


Only the Forgotten

by bloodonthetypewriter



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dead People, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Possession, Soulmates, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-17 10:10:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1383655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodonthetypewriter/pseuds/bloodonthetypewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is just trying to figure out this whole talking-to-the-dead thing as he goes, while also trying to keep his brilliant (read: stupidly almost psychic) new flatmate in the dark. It'd be nice to avoid the loony bin, also. But when a series of crimes committed by people seemingly under spirit possession break out and the dead begin flocking to John for help, he's going to need Sherlock's unique skills to not only put the dead to rest, but also keep the living in their current state. There's also the fact that according to John's sometimes-guardian-angel, Sherlock might be his soulmate. </p>
<p>Between battling an up-and-coming necromancer with a grudge against John moving in on his turf, a friend who's determined to make John his ultimate experiment, and his own changing feelings about the mad git, it's a wonder John even has time for a cuppa. </p>
<p>Actually, the loony bin isn't sounding too bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

John should have known the truth about Mike the moment he turned around and saw him ambling toward him with that open, genial smile. To be fair, at the time he’d been panicking over the fact that someone who knew him (and hell if he knew who that could be in London, with his troop halfway across the world) was going to see him like this. This being wandering, lost in his own city, broken and bitter. Mike Stamford, however, was the sort of bloke to notice things people didn’t want noticed and then kindly ignore them. So if John was thinner and harder-edged than he used to be, it was met with the same gentle humor that almost anything else provoked in his old classmate. And if Mike was looking so pale that he seemed to nearly glow under the fluorescents of St. Bart’s halls, then John was going to return the favor.

That should have been the tip-off, right there, the glowing, but it hadn’t been so obvious in the sun, and Mike had seemed so damn corporeal that it wasn’t until they’d walked into a lab and John had  said, “Bit different from my day,” and turned to give Mike a bland smile that he noticed. Froze on the spot in fact and stared, because John had seen a few dead people since he’d been back from the war, but none quite as bright as Mike was at this moment. Also… what the fuck? How had he not realized Mike was not actually among the living?

Mike gave a small, almost self-conscious shrug, pulled at his belt a little and said, “Heart attack, three days ago. Told you I got fat,” he added at John’s accusatory glare. He nodded toward the other end of the room. “That’s him, the man I told you about.”

John had actually noticed there was another person in the room-- he wasn’t daft, thanks, but he’d been a bit distracted by the ghost of his old friend. Who was actually looking a little like a neon sign at this point. John had to turn away from him, squinting into the room like he’d just come out of the sun, and did Mike have be so enthusiastically deceased?

When his vision had cleared a bit, he finally focused on the other man in the room, the one not dead, whose dark curly head was bent over a petri dish, but whose pale eyes were narrowed and sweeping over John a tad suspiciously. Understandably.

John cleared his throat, and nodded politely at the man, who didn’t return the gesture, only continued to stare.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Mike supplied helpfully. “Just tell him you’re an old friend of mine. I wrote to you about him, that sort of thing.”

John shot another glare at- well, nothing really, since Mike wasn’t actually there, and considered just walking out. He had pride, battered though it was. What he didn’t have, he had to admit to himself after a brief hesitation, was cash enough to stay on his own in London, where home was, and if there was some damn thing he was going to keep in his life, this city was it.

“Ah,” John said, clearing his throat a bit again, and took an awkward step forward. “Sorry, hi. Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yes?” was answered in a deep baritone, not with a little wariness.

John extended his hand. “John Watson. I’m a friend- er, was a friend of Mike Stamford’s.”

The man continued to stare, making no move to take John’s hand, just lifted an eyebrow skeptically. “Were you?”

“Yes, I, um.” John cleared his throat, gearing up for the lie. He really was a horrible liar. “Well, he mentioned you needed a… flatmate?”

The man- Holmes- was going to get a tic if he kept his eyes squinched up like that. “Mike never mentioned an army doctor.”

“Well, I mean, we’d just met again when I got back and-” John stopped, blinked once, and said, “Hang on, sorry, did you say that Mike didn’t mention-? Then how-?”

“Obvious.” The man’s face relaxed, but his eyes didn’t lose any of their sharp interest as he continued to watch John. “You don’t happen to have a phone on you by any chance?”

John had to resist the urge to turn and shoot Mike a look as he hesitated a moment before pulling his mobile out of his pocket and handing it over. He could see Mike though, that weird way that the dead had of creating their own light, but not casting it on the world around them, and as Holmes typed something with a quickness John could only envy, he had to resist squinting as Mike sidled up to stand beside him.

“I’ve got my eye on a nice little flat in central London. Together we should be able to afford it.” Holmes smiled thinly as he handed John his phone, grabbing up a dark coat as he walked toward the door. “We’ll meet tomorrow evening, seven o clock.”

Thrown, John looked up from tucking his mobile back into his pocket and blinked a few times. “Ah, yes. Sure. No, hold on.”

Holmes, who had just walked through the door, leaned back in with an irritated, “Problem?”

John bristled slightly at the tone. “Maybe an address?”

“Oh.” He looked as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “It’s 221B Baker Street.”

Then there was wink and he was gone.

It wasn’t until Holmes had made it what John felt was a safe distance away that he turned to actually look at Mike and say, “I hate you.”

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, John,” was Mike’s unperturbed reply. He wasn’t glowing anymore, either, at least not in a way that was terribly perceptible, which only confirmed John’s suspicion that he’d been doing it to be annoying.

“You might have mentioned that I’d look like a complete nutter talking to no one before I actually walked in the door, ta.” John took a breath, regarding Mike for a moment before the truth of the situation finally hit him and he could have punched himself, he really could. “Oh, God, Mike, I’m sorry. So you’re really-? Christ.” He rubbed a hand down the back of his neck.

Mike just shook his head. “No, don’t, it’s fine, really. Well, not fine, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here, but.” And he shrugged again.

John shuffled his feet awkwardly as he adjusted his grip on his cane, then cleared his throat. “Well, if you ever do find out… I mean, if I can help-”

“You’ll be the first person to know,” Mike assured him.

John nodded a bit, eyes still on the door and something was still bothering him. He turned back to Mike, his mouth open to ask a question, but was stopped by Mike’s smug grin. “So you didn’t then? Tell him about me? So what, is he--?”

“Psychic? No. That’s just him.” He looked entirely too amused for John’s liking as he said, “Ask him how he knew, next time you see him.”

John straightened up a bit and lifted his chin. “And who says I’m seeing him again?”

And then, to John’s annoyance, there was a laugh and Mike was gone. 


	2. Chapter Two

The thing of it was, John hadn't been doing the whole talking-to-the-dead thing for very long. He wasn’t born with the ability (and thank whatever deity had thrown this mess at him for that, because his teen years had been awkward enough with an alcoholic father and a lesbian sister), and until he’d woken up in the field hospital, finally coherent after days being half-delirious with the pain and fever, he hadn’t even been sure he believed in anything like an afterlife. But as reality slammed into him and he groaned with the unfairness of it, finally opening his eyes, what stood by his bedside had him wondering.

That is, after the all-consuming panic.

He’d jolted upright in bed, his cry of, “Bloody buggering fuck!” as much from pain as surprise as the man standing next to his cot took a startled step back. The man who couldn’t possibly be standing there, because John had been there when he died, had actually been crouched over him, hands covered in his blood when he had gone. That, and he was glowing softly, as well as missing a good third of the left side of his torso.

“You all right, Captain?” the kid-- Briggs, his badge said-- had asked, eyeing John warily, as if he were the impossible one.

“Am I- wha- no!” John had pushed himself up against the railing on the opposite side of the bed, and as his body was screamed at him. His muscles were shaking with the effort of maintaining the distance, and wasn’t that just proof it wasn’t the pain meds doing this to him?

The man followed John’s darting glance down to his midsection and grimaced self-consciously, poking at the spot where his kidney should have been. “Oh, right. That. It doesn’t hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Worried-- no, I’m not, it’s not that, it’s-” John stopped, ran a hand down his face as he took a few deep breaths. Cracked. He’d obviously cracked, clean cut from reality, that was the only explanation. “You’re bloody dead, Private.”

There was a small silence following that statement, and whether John was hoping for it all to be over or hoping that he wasn’t going to be the one to have to deal with the emotional fallout such a statement would bring, he wasn’t really sure. What he wasn’t expecting was the incredulous look from the boy, directed first at his missing torso, and then at John. “You don’t say.”

Dead or not, John was still a rank or two above the brat, so he was understandably a little terse with his reply. “If you’re dead, why are you talking to me?”

He seemed surprised by the question and said, “Well, I-” and then stopped and scratched at an eyebrow in confusion. “That’s what they said to do.”

“They who?” John asked when there was no further explanation.

The man threw his hands up. “I don’t know! They. If I want to move on- over, wherever, they said I needed to talk to you. And that you’d help. With- well-”

This was accompanied by a vague hand gesture that really could have meant anything.

The sound John made as he adjusted himself back onto his bed was a mixture of exasperation and confusion, because if this was a hallucination, it was annoying and vague, and why couldn’t he just hallucinate spiders on the ceiling like everyone else? It was consistent, though, he had to give it that, and stubborn, because it kept standing there even after a few minutes of silence during which John considered just ignoring it all together. It was broken when the man cleared his throat and rocked forward on the balls of his feet, hands clasped behind his back. “So… is that a yes, then?”

“Yes to what?” John replied shortly. “You haven’t actually told me what I’m supposed to do yet to-” and John repeated the vague gesture the other had made earlier.

“Oh, right,” Briggs said, shifting again, and was it even possible for the dead to blush? “There’s this girl-”

“Of course there is,” John muttered and received a glare. John held up his hands and he continued.

“We’ve been going- well, we were going.” He made a sound of frustration. “There’s this ring, see, and it was supposed to be for her. We were going to make it official at the end of the month, when I was shipped back home. Only- well, obviously, that’s not going to happen now.” He took a breath, and John felt a pang of sympathy for the shakiness of it. “I have her mum’s wedding ring. Her dad gave it to me to propose to her with, the week before he died, and she doesn’t know. Never found the right time to give it to her, what with the funeral and all.”

“And you want me to find it and make sure it gets back to her.” John sighed. “You realize that they’ve probably already shipped your things back to your family and they’re not actually here?”

“You would think so,” he replied, getting a little excited at the fact that it seemed John might help him. “Most of my stuff did. Except that. Because it was expensive,” he added when John failed to take the hint.

It took another ten seconds or so (which John wholeheartedly blamed on the morphine). “It was stolen?” His brow pulled together in annoyance. “Who?”

“Bannon,” he answered and John had a vague recollection of a face to put to the name. “A bunch of us play poker when we get the time, and I owe him a hundred quid. Or owed, I guess.” He huffed a laugh that had no amusement in it. “He had it as collateral, and now he figures I’m gone, he can keep it since he’s not gonna get his hundred. He can’t, in case you were wondering.”

John rubbed absently at the headache starting in his left temple as he considered his options. On the one hand, this could be an extremely potent, drug-addled dream and he’d look like a right arse summoning some poor sod into his room and accusing him of stealing from the dead. But the throbbing pain of his shoulder, and the faint scratch of gauze against the coarse, hospital-issues sheets, the smell of antiseptic and sand, the bloody heat… it all pointed to the other option.

“If I do this,” John finally said, directing a firm glare the kid, who drew himself up into a more respectful stance, “you’ll be able to… move on, then? Away from me.”

He nodded. “That’s what they say.”

John licked his lips, thinking, and then nodded. “Yeah, all right. Just… give me a couple days, all right? And I swear to God, if you aren’t real-”

“No, that’s fine, I mean, I am, I promise,” the kid said, beaming, and reached out to shake John’s hand. John couldn’t quite help his jerk back, though, and his sharp cry of pain brought a nurse running in, reprimanding him and trying to push him back down into the bed. He managed to bat her away as politely as possible while gritting his teeth against the pain, and wasn’t sure whether he was comforted or terrified by the fact that, even with reality undeniably in front of him, he could still see Private Briggs standing in the room.

It took another couple of days for John to hunt down Private Bannon and a surprisingly brief phone call to get him to turn in the ring; John even went so far as to let him pretend like it had somehow been an accident. Thankfully, he was working under a guilty enough conscience that John’s half-arsed story about how he’d even known about the ring wasn’t mentioned. There was no way in hell John was about to tell anyone that he’d actually had a conversation with the dead.

John spent a good twenty minutes staring blankly out the window after the phone call. There was proof right there, in the mail on it’s way to an almost-widow, that John had actually had spoken to a dead soldier. He could only hope that it was one-off thing, born of the fact that his was the last face Briggs had seen before death.

A week later: hopes, dashed as John woke from a light doze sitting up in his bed and saw a grinning Private Briggs at the end of his bed, and fucking hell, he was not alone.

John went from groggy to wide awake in point two seconds.

“What are you doing?” he hissed as though someone might hear him, though the bed next to him was empty and the door was closed. “You’re supposed to be gone!”

“Oh, I will be,” Briggs assured him as he ambled closer to the head of the bed. “Well, I mean, assuming it doesn’t get lost in the post. Bannon sent it standard, cheap bastard.”

He gave a shrug at John’s horrified expression. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, since you’ll be shippin’ out eventually anyway, and I’d be stuck here. Probably passed on to the next medium that rolls through here.”

John’s brow furrowed. “The next what?”

Briggs made a flitty gesture at all of John with his fingers. “Me-di-um. You know, you people who help us stiffs on to the hereafter.”

“Oh no,” John said, and shook his head so hard that his shoulder protested. “No, that’s not-- it’s not a thing I do, all right? That was one time!”

John had forgotten about the other man in the room until he yelped, “Billy!” in a panicked way that made Briggs flinch and put up a hand behind himself to stall the coming argument.

He regarded John warily as he said, “Captain… you do know what you are, don’t you?”

“A fucking nutjob, apparently,” he muttered and gave a sharp look to other man at the end of his bed when he made a low sound of distress.

Briggs shushed him again without turning his gaze away from John. “I don’t know what they told you when you went through, but I’m not your only client. This is a lifelong deal.”

There were so many things wrong with those two sentences, John didn’t know where to start.

“First of all,” he started, trying to modulate his voice by pushing it through his teeth, “I never went through anywhere. What does that even mean? And secondly, just- no. Lifelong? What is this, some kind of divine punishment?” By the end of it, John was close to shouting and had to stop and take a few breaths, half expecting someone to come through the door with another sedative.

Briggs gave him a second to get himself together and then said, “It’s not a punishment, Captain. It’s a reward. That’s why they call it a gift.”

John gave a harsh bark of laughter and was about to tell Briggs exactly where they could shove their gift when there was a quick rap on the door and it opened to reveal a nurse. “All right, Watson?” he asked, giving John a quick visual once-over and John jerked his head and gave a tight smile.

“Yeah, fine. Just, um.” He pointed quickly at the mystery novel sitting on his bedside drawers. “Funny book.”

The nurse raised an eyebrow. “I thought I heard shouting.”

John blinked. “Well, yes. Aggravating also.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t know why I’m even reading it, really.”

The nurse nodded and gave John that smile that meant he’d be reviewing how much medication John had been getting lately. “Okay, well, if you’re fine.”

“Yes, fine,” John assured him and kept his smile until the door closed.

The look Briggs gave John made him huff and annoyed laugh in spite of himself. “Not a word, Private.”

“No, sir,” Briggs said with a poorly contained smile. “Of course not, sir.”

John gave a sigh and let his head fall back against his pillows with a soft sound, his gaze catching on the miserable boy standing at the end of his bed. The way he was turned half away from John, tense and straight, but gazing at the floor like a disappointed child harmonized sickly with the three bullet holes in his left upper back, the fabric of his shirt blood-soaked. John had worked on too many similar injuries to be ignorant of the way he had likely died, choking on and drowning in his own blood. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in through his nose.

John hadn’t made it this far in his life being a fool. He knew what the barely healing wound in his shoulder meant, the shake of his left hand, and if that weren’t enough, the hard edge to the doctors’ sympathetic looks confirmed it. What purpose did he have now, when everything he’d worked toward, every tool and skill he’d formed for himself was fashioned around helping other people? What choice did he really have when he had nothing to give the living? No choice, really, and as the boy at the end of the bed finally looked up to meet his eyes, John made his decision.

Trying not to sound too resigned, he pulled himself as straight as the hospital bed and his bandaged shoulder would allow and asked firmly, “What are you here for then?”

The point is, John was really just trying to figure it out has he went. He didn’t have a mentor or a spirit guide or whatever they were called, and a search online had him looking incredulously at the screen and slamming his laptop closed harder than was probably safe for it barely an hour after opening the search engine. He’d briefly considered contacting one of the so-called “spiritualists” he’d found while searching, but balked at the idea when it occurred to him that it meant he’d actually have to talk to someone about it. Two weeks into his return to England, however, and while he’d seen plenty of them, not a single lost soul had come to him; John had a careful hope that maybe he’d done his penance (and it was a penance, no matter what Briggs had called it) and that he was free to fade into his nonexistence without the constant reminder of what had happened. Mike had put an end to that, though, and what is that they say? It never rains, but it pours?

Fitting then that it was a crash of thunder that woke him at two in the morning the night before he was supposed to meet Sherlock and he found a glowing pink woman sitting at his desk.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... uh, I know, I haven't left any notes yet, but I thought I should give you a heads up. If you care at all, I mean. My plan is to update every Friday, and so far it hasn't been a problem. That being said, I'm in nursing school and we just started clinicals, and my schedule for that changes every three weeks with varying amounts (epic to panic-inducing amounts) of homework, so I may get behind on a few of them. Chapter Four is nearly ready to go, though, so next Friday shouldn't be a problem! Also, if you notice any mistakes, please let me know so I can fix them. I edited, but my brain is fried from being a student on a Med-Surge hospital floor all day and my brain is full of doctor's notes- meaning weird grammar and lots of abbreviations that make no sense.

John wasn’t sure what it said about himself that his first thought on meeting the first soul he’d seen in London was a half-hysterical hope he’d put put pants on under his pyjamas. His second more rational thought was that dear god, she was wearing a lot of pink. It glowed softly, almost with a shimmer, and John got diva vibes from her, despite that fact that her skin was waxy pale and her lips were tinged blue. He had a vague impression of swollen, bloated tissue underneath the smooth, made-up face in the way that meant the ghost was either in denial of what it had looked like at death or hiding how it looked out of vanity and he thought he knew which it was as she crossed her legs daintily and brushed blond hair back, looking around the bedsit with a critical eye.  

John rubbed his face, biting off tired curses as he pulled himself up and swung his legs over the side of his bed. The clock on his bedside table said two thirty, and as the crashing sound he’d thought was thunder shook his room, he was dead sure he wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep. Not if the neighbors were slamming things about this early in the morning. She watched him without saying anything, and he felt a vague suspicion forming the longer she stared at him. He cleared his throat, running fingers through his hair quickly, but other than that just sat staring back at her. She did have the only chair, after all, and he’d be damned if he was going to feel self-conscious in his own home.

Which really only went so far as she continued to stare at him like he should be able to read her mind and the vague suspicion got stronger. “Okay,” he finally said slowly. “You can’t actually speak to me, can you?”

Her cyanotic lips thinned in irritation and she shook her head once.

“Bugger,” John muttered and stood up off the bed to limp into the kitchenette. He flipped on the kettle and turned to lean against the counter as he rubbed sleep from his eyes. The mute dead were not the worst he’d had to work with, and he supposed he should be grateful that he was getting a full visual and none of the awful psychic feedback that he got with some of the others that he’d encountered, but it did make his job harder when they couldn’t outright tell him what they needed. From the looks of her, she wasn’t going to be up to a game of charades, either. He ran through the options he had quickly and decided on the most straightforward.

“Is there a way you can show me what you need?” he asked, only half expecting an answer. The look she gave in him in return had him gritting his teeth, because he wasn’t the bloody hired help, wasn’t actually getting paid for this at all, actually, and neither was he a mind reader. There had been a few so far who had assumed he’d know what they needed as soon as they showed up, and one or two who were angry when he couldn’t figure it out by staring at them. Which didn’t make him inclined to help them, but he felt a kind of obligation to help when he could, and that didn’t stop, apparently, when the person in need was dead. Neither did he feel like he could pick and choose who received his help; he just didn’t have the ego for it.

“The thing is,” he said as he rubbed his forehead and willed the water to boil faster, “unless you can give me a hint or something, I’m not going to be of much use to you. Is it… I don’t know, is it a boyfriend?”

She raised her pale left hand and flashed a wedding band at him.

“Husband?” he asked as the kettle whistled and waited for her to shake her head before he turned to shut off the stove and pour hot water into his mug. He picked it up and turned back to lean against the counter, rubbing absently as his right thigh as he thought. “Is it family? Your mother or father maybe?”

Again, she shook her head no.

“Did you owe someone something? Money, maybe or… no?” he asked when her lips tightened and she shook her again sharply, obviously becoming agitated. John was beginning to get a headache.

He looked her over again. Maybe if he knew how she died, the circumstances, he could work back from there. She was unnaturally pale, more so than just being the undead warranted, and he took a longer look at the blue tinge to her lips, noting the tinge around them and around her nostrils. The closer he looked, the less she could hide what she really looked like, but the worse John’s head pounded, the headache worsening until it was like an ice pick stabbing behind his eyes. He forced himself to continue concentrating, even as his heart thumped hard, stuttered, and then started racing. It wasn’t until he was coughing, choking, and shaking so hard that he had to hold the counter to keep himself up that he let the image go, but he’d gotten enough to see the red bursts in the whites of her eyes, the swelling of her face, and the sour burn in his mouth confirmed his suspicions.

“Right,” he managed to rasp through a few more dry, racking coughs. He took a deep breath and straightened up, bracing himself against the counter again. “You choked to death, I get that, maybe aspirated?”

She stared blankly back at him, and he realized the word might not mean anything to her.

Great, like this wasn’t awkward enough already. “Did you inhale anything… like vomit?” he had to add when she continued to look lost. He thought he might be getting somewhere when she nodded, her skin coloring slightly in either aggravation or embarrassment; it was hard to tell through the put-upon air she had. Which didn’t make his next question any easier.

“Were you drinking then, before it happened, passed out, maybe?”

She shook her head again and after a slight hesitation, put a hand over her throat, tightening and looking at him like he should understand. A few ideas came to mind, but he wasn’t about to touch half of them yet unless he had to. Apparently he didn’t answer fast enough, though, because she rolled her eyes, put both hands around her neck, and made a choking motion.

“Someone did this to you?” he asked in confusion, and was even more confused when she nodded her head slowly as if he needed the help. “Do you know who?”

She shook her head again and the aggravation was coming off of her in waves now, making John’s muscles ache with tension and his jaw ache with the desire to grit his teeth. He rolled his shoulders, and winced at the twinge in his left, trying to let it roll over him and not into him; it was one of the few things the internet had been good for, teaching him how to avoid being infected by feelings that weren’t his own. The dead rarely had any positive feelings about their deaths, especially if they were coming to him for help, and the first few times he’d had to deal with the crushing, black depression, it had almost ended him.

“Is that what you need then, you need me to find out who did it?” he asked, and finally, finally she nodded her head… but then also held up her hand, making a motion for sort of.

John bit back a groan of aggravation. Because what, exactly, was he supposed to do with that? He was supposed to find her murderer and bring him to justice, but she couldn’t tell him who had done it? And what did sort of mean?

“Look,” he said, and it came out a bit sharper than he intended for it to, but this would be aggravating when he hadn’t been suddenly pulled out of sleep in the middle of the night, “I’m going to need a bit more to go on here. You can’t just tell me you were murdered and expect me to figure out the rest. I’m not a bloody detective, and even if I were, I’d need something to go on, clues or leads or-” he stopped as she stood suddenly, straightening her jacket with a firm tug and stalked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked, brows dropped in confusion, because the dead just didn’t use doors. They just disappeared, to where John had no idea and had never been inclined to ask, but he’d never once seen one walk through a doorway.

Then again, maybe she just wanted to make a dramatic exit.

She turned to look at him, dropping her gaze to his pyjamas, then put a hand on her hip and began tapping one luminous pink heel.  It only took John, who was halfway through his tea and considerably more awake now, a second or two to get it. Not making an exit then, at least not without him, and for fuck’s sake it was three in the morning.

But really, what else did he have to do?

“Yeah, all right,” he sighed, setting his mug into the small sink. “Just… let me get my trousers.”

 

The cab ride to Brixton was hell, because John couldn’t actually tell the cabbie where they were going; instead, he had to give directions as they came from the dead woman beside him, which relegated him to watching her point out the window and voice the directions out loud, occasionally barking them when she waited until the last twenty feet before a turn to make up her mind. It took at least half an hour before they finally ended up somewhere in Brixton, at an abandoned house that John firmly told himself did not give him the creeps as the cabbie took his cash and drove off. To be honest, he’d begun wondering if she even knew where they were going, but a long look at the house made John think that yes, he could definitely picture someone being murdered here. The dead woman had lost some of her glow, her shoulders hunching forward a bit as she stared at the front door.

“This is it, then?” he asked quietly as he watched her profile. “Where it happened?”

Her answer was to straighten her shoulders and walk toward the door. John hesitated a moment, turning his cell phone over in his hand. He was tempted to phone the police, leave an anonymous tip, and be done with it. The thing of it was, that just wasn’t how John worked. Sitting back to let others do the work just wasn’t his style. Eventually, yes, he was going to have to call the police, but not before he got his own look at what was going on. It was easier to get information from the ghost anyway, without anyone else there, because he didn’t have to pretend he couldn’t see them and risk looking like a lunatic when he needed to ask them something. They tended to remember more about the events surrounding their deaths when they were in the location where it had actually happened, at least according to John’s limited experience, and the more information he could get from her to relay to the police, the faster they could hopefully catch whoever had done this.

It didn’t escape John, as he approached the house and let himself inside the rotting, unlocked door, that he had no forensic experience and really had no clue what he was doing. He had the common sense to cover his hands with his sleeves as he turned the doorknob and shouldered his way through the stubborn door, but as soon as he was through and the sound of the protesting hinges died out, he realized he had a problem. Because abandoned buildings typically didn’t have power, and he wasn’t carrying a torch. The best he had was the screen of his mobile, and as he hit a button to light it up and held it out in front of himself, it lit all of two feet in front of him. The rest of the house beyond was nearly black, the only patches of light diluted streetlight through filthy windows.

John shuffled further into the room, using his cane to feel out the ground in front of himself as he went. The air was damp and smelled faintly of mold and dirt, and as he followed the gleam of the woman ahead of him and came to a staircase, he realized that he had another problem. With one hand on his phone, and the other on his cane, he was going to have to juggle lighting with his balance and the stairs were steep, narrow things that made his leg throb just looking at them. It was, actually, humiliating to be standing at the bottom of the stairs trying to figure a way up as the woman stood on the first landing waiting impatiently for him. In the end, there was really nothing for it, and he ended up gripping his cane with one hand, and the bannister with the other, his hand contorted awkwardly to shine enough light down so that he could at least see the steps in front of him. He only caught one on the way up, nearly face-planting on the second story landing, but thankfully that’s where the woman had stopped, in front of another battered door. This one, however, was already cracked open and the lights from the street were a bit brighter through the window- just enough for him to make out the darker-on-dark form on the floor that he assumed was the woman’s body.

John took two steps into the room and then stopped, taken over by sudden awkwardness. It wasn’t like he’d never been around bodies before, it kind of came with the territory of both surgeon and soldier, but he’d never been with someone’s corpse while they were standing next to him. It was a new level of weird that he’d never even contemplated. The sound of a siren passing by a few streets over jolted him out of his head, and he turned to actually look at the woman who was hovering near his shoulder now, staring down at herself with a slightly sick expression. John gave her a minute before giving her sympathetic smile, and then he stepped forward as carefully as he could with a cane and practically blind, moving around the prone form. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for really, until he got around to in front of her, and he probably would have missed it if the ghost hadn’t shifted suddenly to stand beside him, staring intently at the floor.

John shifted the phone so that the light bounced off the scuffed floorboards and winced when it illuminated her bloodied hand. Above it, gouged into the wood, was the word Rache. He squinted at it for a moment, moving the light across it in case he’d missed anything, but looked up when a hand waved in his peripheral vision. The woman pointed at the floor firmly and then made an L shape in the air, and then stood looking at him as if it explained everything.

It didn’t, actually.

“I’m sorry, I don’t-” he started, but cut when she made the gesture again, more aggressively this time and then nearly stamped her foot.

“Okay, all right,” John said appeasingly, and looked down at the floor again. Rache and L.

Oh.

“Rachel?” he asked and when she nodded her head in a way that scream about time, asked, “Who was Rachel?”

This time, when she folded her arms toward her chest and made a rocking motion, he was a bit quicker on the uptake.

“Your daughter. Right. Good.” He stood and stared down at the body for a minute, biting his lip before adding, “No, actually, because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that. Your daughter murdered you, is that it?”

At which point she threw up her hands and took a step or two in the opposite direction.

He was about to tell her that he was trying to help her and that he wasn’t actually obligated to, and by the way, she was bloody horrible at charades, when the door suddenly flew in, followed by shouts of, “Don’t move!” and a swarm of people holding proper torches-- and guns, John didn’t fail to spot. He froze as instructed, but not before an involuntary jerk of surprise that sent his lit mobile sailing out of his hands, right into a black gloved one that snatched it out of the air.

John felt his stomach sink as he caught sight of the man inspecting his phone and turning it over in his hands, while a police officer approached him and pushed him to his knees, pulling his arms behind his back to cuff him. The eyes that met his as he finally looked up were pale and almost gleaming, even in the dim light and a smirk completely inappropriate for the situation crossed Sherlock’s face as he looked John over. “Hello, Doctor Watson. Fancy seeing you here.”

And that was his chance at a flatshare, gone right out the window.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to move updates to Saturdays now, just because with school it's kind of hard to get an edit in before Friday night. After clinicals and homework, my brain is no shape to be working on spelling and grammar. And I'm usually really good with both of those, but it's easy to miss stuff in your own work, so let me know if you see anything. 
> 
> And also, thank you so much for the comments and kudos! I didn't expect anything like what I've received, since I only started this to contribute to a group that's helped me escape reality for the past three years, and I'm really grateful for the support. :)

“I told you,” John groaned, passed the point of irritation and right into completely done with this. “I was just out, and I saw a couple of kids go into the house. It didn’t look safe, and it was three in the morning. All I wanted to do was chase them out before they got hurt.”

“Uh-huh,” said the grey-haired detective, and John shifted irritably, suppressing a wince at the twinge in his bad shoulder. “You were just out at three in morning for a walk? In Brixton?”

“I get nightmares,” John gritted, and that at least was true. “When I can’t sleep, I take a walk.”

“And you just happened to stumble onto a murder victim?”

John stared at the DI hard, and gave him the same answer he’d been giving him for the past thirty minutes. “Yes.”

The DI’s mouth opened, his face set to deliver sarcasm, when the door to the interview room opened and they both turned to watch Sherlock Holmes stalk up, coat swirling around his legs as he stopped suddenly. He all but ignored John as he turned to the DI and demanded, “Is it ready?”

“Sherlock,” the man said in weary irritation, “I’m in the middle of something.”

“What?” he asked as he turned around and seemed to finally spot John. “Still with him? Oh, please,” he said, his voice laced with derision. “You can’t think he did it.”

The DI crossed his arms and raised his chin. “And why not?”

“Because,” Sherlock said on a bark of harsh laughter, and John wanted to throw something at the back of his head, because he was sitting right there, thank you. “He had a mobile in one hand and a cane in the other. His footprints were all over the place- he shuffled, he couldn’t even see, and he barely made it up the stairs. How exactly could he have done it? Beat her over the head with is cane?”

“Hold on-” John bristled, and then stopped when the silver eyes turned to regard him in a way that made him bite back his ego. He couldn’t have said if you screw this up, you’re more of an idiot than I thought more clearly out loud. John wasn’t sure what had caused his desire to assert that he could murder someone, actually, but he found he was offended that it seemed unlikely that he could.

“You wanna tell me what he was doing here at three in the morning then?”

It may have been John’s imagination, but that sounded like a challenge.

Sherlock, who hadn’t stopped looking at John, let his gaze wander over him for a minute before turning back around. “Nightmares, obvious. He went for a walk and caught those children breaking in. They ran out the back when they found the body, which is when they called you. John was just a bit slow to get up the stairs. He’s a doctor, he wouldn’t have left someone alone like that, even a corpse. He had his phone out to call you, but the children had already called, and that,” and at this, he turned and gave the DI an accusatory stare, “is when you came in and arrested him. Wrongfully, I might add. Isn’t that right, John?”

John hadn’t realized that his jaw was hanging open unattractively until Sherlock turned to give him a smirk. His jaw shut with an audible click and he nodded, “Yes, right. Absolutely. In fact,” he rolled his shoulder with a dramatic wince that was only partially faked, “I think you may have injured me, pulling on my arm like that.”

Sherlock turned back to the DI and raised his eyebrows. “You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t sue. Treating a war veteran like this, you should be ashamed, Lestrade.”

“Oh, come off it,” the DI huffed, unimpressed, but looked over John for a moment before conceding. “Yeah, all right. Come here, Dr. Watson.”

John turned around and waited as the DI pulled the cuff keys out of his pocket and unlocked the ones around John’s wrist. He bit back a groan as his arms fell forward into their natural position and rubbed at his wrists. Bloody hell, those things were tight.

“So,” the DI said conversationally, apparently ready to be friendly now that he he had been assured that John wasn’t a murderer, “you wanna tell me how you two know each other?”

John opened his mouth to answer, but stopped when Sherlock beat him to it with, “We’re flatmates.”

John looked at him in surprise. “Not yet, we’re not.”

Sherlock’s smile was irritatingly arrogant. “We will be.”

John raised his eyebrows, crossing his arms over his chest as he turned to give the man his full attention. “Will we?”

Sherlock’s response was to continue with that smirk, until the DI cleared his throat. “Okay, so, I’ve got a job to do here. I’ll leave you to it. And Sherlock,” he added sternly, already beginning to walk away, “not a peep from you until I give the go-ahead, do you hear me?”

Seething, Sherlock called back, “If you think you can get it done before I drop dead!”

His reply was a two-finger gesture that John was reasonably certain wasn’t at all professional to use. Sherlock, for his part, was unimpressed.

John put one arm out, leaning his weight against the car and off his leg with a suppressed wince as he watched the forensic team move in and out of the house, carrying black cases and equipment John had no use for knowing. He didn’t miss the curious glances they were throwing his way, or rather their way; he was pretty sure Sherlock was getting the brunt of it. He did look oddly out of place, with his barely-restrained curls and sweeping coat, and for God’s sake, did he have to fidget quite so much? He was nearly vibrating with impatient energy, his sharp eyes snapping over everything.

“So, um,” John said and then stopped. There was no acknowledgement from the other man that he’d said anything- or was even standing there, really. John decided to try again. “What are you doing here?”

“What?” Sherlock asked absently as he narrowed his eyes at a certain man walking through the door. Not calculating, just… spiteful.

“You,” John reiterated. “You’re not police. So what are you doing here with them?”

“I was in Lestrade’s office when he got the call. Working on a cold case. Dull. This is much more fun.” The smile he gave the building made John lean a little further into the car and away from him.

That seemed to be the end of it, except… that didn’t really answer John’s question. “So, what, you’re some kind of specialist? Or a detective?”

“Consulting detective,” he answered proudly, and now he was finally giving John his attention. “Only one in the world; I invented the job.”

Again, no other information was forthcoming. John wasn’t sure if he was trying to draw out the conversation or get rid of him. Either way, John wanted to know: “Which is what, exactly?”

“When the police are out of their depth, which is always,” he added, trailing off a bit and frowning slightly as that same man came out of the door barking orders, “they come to me for help. I see things that other people miss.”

“Such as?” John asked, rubbing at his ear. What was that awful screeching? Were they drilling holes in there or something?

“Such as the fact that you’re an army doctor with a psychosomatic limp and have an alcoholic for a brother you don’t get along with- probably because of his wife.”

Sherlock wasn’t even looking at him, but John’s hand stopped rubbing at his ear suddenly and he blinked once. “What?”

Sherlock glanced at him before turning back to watch the scene. “What?”

“What you just said.” John shifted to face him. “How-?”

Sherlock finally turned to give him his full attention, eyes sharp and glittering hard. “Your hair and stance say military, and your conversation as you walked into the room said trained at Barts- so, army doctor. Your limp is bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair, stood just fine the entire time Lestrade was questioning you, almost like you’d forgotten about it- psychosomatic, then. Then there’s your phone. It’s scratched from being in a pocket with keys and coins; you wouldn’t treat something that expensive so carelessly, so it’s a second-hand gift from a relative. The engraving on the back says Harry, and this is a young man’s phone, so a brother; it’s unlikely you have any extended family. Clara, three x’s, romantic attachment then, and something this expensive says long-term attachment. You like his wife. Not so much the drinking.”

John could only stare for a moment, not a thought in his head beside what the fuck?

Sherlock stood watching him, suddenly completely still, the only movement the flicker of his eyes over John’s face and every line of him had lost all impatience that was replaced with tension.

“How,” John said, his voice coming out slightly rough, “can you possibly know about the drinking?”

Sherlock relaxed minutely, but his smirk was strained. “Tiny scratches around the power connection on the phone; his hands shake when he goes to plug it in at night. You never see those marks on a sober man’s phone, and never see a drunk’s without them.” Seemingly done with the conversation, he turned to watch the house again and fidget. Mostly fidget.

John was going to have to surgically hinge his jaw shut if he wanted to stop looking like a gaping idiot. “That… was amazing.”

Sherlock stilled suddenly in shock, and John’s gaze snapped to the house, sure something was wrong, until he heard a wary, “Really?”

John’s gaze travelled back to the man beside him, who was facing the house but watching John. “Of course it was. Extraordinary.”

Sherlock turned to face him, but with a wary sort of surprise. “That’s not what people normally say.”

“What do people normally say?”

Sherlock’s voice was dead serious as he answered, “Piss off.”

John’s answering grin seemed to throw him off even more.

“Sherlock!” someone called and his head snapped so quickly to face the house that John was surprised he didn’t hear bones crack. “We’re ready for you.”

Just like that, he was off, stalking  forward with long, purposeful strides that John couldn’t help but envy just a little. Which reminded him that his cane was somewhere God only knew, and he was currently holding himself up against a police car. “Bugger,” he muttered, looking toward the police milling about outside. He could ask one of them, he supposed, but that would mean either calling one of them over or trying to limp their way, and either option was more embarrassing than he was ready to deal with.  

He turned to look down the street, toying with the possibility of calling a cab. Except he didn’t know the exact address he was at, and that would mean leaving his cane behind, which was damn expensive, as much as he hated it. It was, in all honesty, a very tempting idea. He toyed with it for a moment, imagining have to force himself around without, when the decision was made for him.

Gloved hands gripped his arms suddenly and spun him around, shoving his cane at him before he had the chance to lash out. With a satisfied nod, Sherlock turned around again, walking back toward the house as he called over his shoulder, “Come on, John.”

“What?” John called dumbly, but Sherlock kept walking and John had started to follow before he realized he had taken four steps toward him. “Mr. Holmes-”

Sherlock turned to face John, snorting as took a few backward steps. “Please, Dr. Watson, it’s Sherlock.”

“Oh,” John replied, and why the hell was he still walking forward? “Well, then, John, I guess.”

“Pleasure,” he answered with a sarcastic grin, and then turned to face the yellow police tape that they’d reached. He lifted it, waiting a bit impatiently as John closed the distance between them with awkward steps. He’d just reached the line when a dark haired woman broke off from a group of police officers milling about and called, “Oi! Freak!”

Sherlock’s face was like marble it was so cold and hard. The woman moved to knock his arm away from the tape, but he ducked under it quickly and let it go, a bright, offensive grin crossing his face when she made a small sound of indignation. “Sally.”

She narrowed her eyes at him fiercely. “What are you doing here?”

“I was invited.”

She gave an incredulous laugh. “No, you invited yourself. Don’t think I didn’t see you beat Lestrade to the street. How much did you pay to get here before the police?”

Sherlock looked unperturbed by the accusation. “I’d tell you to ask him yourself, but I don’t have all week. John?” He lifted up the tape again to about shoulder height, which John realized with some chagrin, was just high enough for him to easily walk under.

Before he could move, though, Sally slapped Sherlock’s hand away. “Oh no, you’re not bringing him in here. He’s a bloody suspect!”

“Was a suspect,” Sherlock snapped. “He’s also my assistant. I don’t have time for this.”

He turned to block Sally with his shoulder, lifting the tape again. John only hesitated for a second before Sherlock’s glare got to him and he stepped across, letting Sherlock herd up behind him as if the female police officer were going to grab him at any minute and throw him back to the civilian side. Which… why wasn’t he on the civilian side?

“What are we doing here?” John asked as he tried to keep up with Sherlock’s quick stride.

“Solving a murder.”

“Oh,” John said. Then, “No, hold on, what am I doing here?”

Sherlock either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him as they entered the house, Sherlock skirting easily around the hordes of people coming in and out of rooms and John muttering apologies under his breath as he just tried not to run into anyone. There was, thankfully, light now, set up by the forensic crew and it was about half as hard to make it up the stairs this time, staying close to Sherlock’s back so that he’d be out of everyone’s way. They made it to the cramped landing outside the door where John was pointed to a pile of PPE gear and he paused to pull it on before grabbing his cane to follow a gear-less Sherlock into the room. Which was kind of a shame, because John would have liked to mentally file a photo of the smug git wearing the ridiculous stuff. Except that, John mused, he would probably make it look good.

The thought shocked him a bit and he stopped partway through the door. Because John didn’t have thoughts like that about men often, and rarely over a corpse.

He didn’t have much time to dwell on it, however, before a familiar gruff voice asked, “What’s he doing here?”

Sherlock’s voice was all smooth confidence as he answered, “He’s with me.”

“Sherlock, no.” Lestrade shook his head once firmly. “He can’t; he’s a suspect!”

“Was a suspect, what is it with you people and verb tenses?” Sherlock snapped.

Feeling more than a little awkward, John said hesitantly, “Ah… should I just-?”

“No,” Sherlock said staunchly at the same time Lestrade said, “Yes.”

Sherlock hissed an annoyed breath and whirled on the DI. “You need me, I need an assistant, ergo, he stays.”

The DI made some argument back, but John wasn’t paying much attention anymore, because the room had mostly cleared out at some point in the conversation, and John suddenly had an unimpeded view of the dead woman’s spirit, standing in the corner of the room, with not-amused hands on her hips, glowing like the flipping northern star. Which in and of itself wasn’t so out of the ordinary. John had every intention of ignoring her as long as he could.

Until she opened her mouth and said with venom, “About bleeding time.”


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's late, but I went to put it up last night and AO3 was down for maintenance. And then homework happened today, and I had it edited, so it got a bit later. Back on track now, though!

John was so surprised that he said, “You can- how-?” before he remembered that he wasn’t alone in the room. He could feel himself flushing as he cleared his throat and met the curious gazes of Sherlock and Lestrade. His tight nothing’s-wrong-with-me-smile went ignored as Lestrade rolled his eyes muttering, “God help me,” and Sherlock continued to stare at John, his eyes darting briefly to where the dead woman stood. John stilled, his heart picking up speed as Sherlock tilted his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. It occurred to John that Sherlock had been following his line of sight and hadn’t actually sensed anything abnormal in the room. With the way Sherlock had torn him apart earlier, though, he wasn’t sure that Sherlock couldn’t figure it out.  

He wasn’t sure why exactly, but the thought of his knowing what John could actually do as opposed to just thinking that he was a bit crazy was slightly terrifying. Possibly because of the way Sherlock looked at him, which was the same way he’d always imagined military researchers would if they ever got their hands on someone like him. John was halfway to a plausible excuse about sleep deprivation and night terrors when Sherlock gave a small shake of his head, like he was dismissing a line of thought. With one more sweeping look at John and another glance toward the dead woman, he moved toward the body on the other side of the room.

Because apparently the corpse was far more fascinating at the moment than a hallucinating potential flat mate.  

John let some of the tension in his shoulders go as he breathed heavily out of his nose, closing his eyes for a second until his heart started to slow to its normal rhythm. The dead woman had gone the way of the detective and lost interest in him. She warily watched Sherlock look her over, her arms crossed over her chest and seemed to be vacillating between curiosity and indignation at his clinical assessment. “What’s he looking for?” she asked John, tilting her head toward his slightly without moving her gaze.

He wanted to ask how the hell he was supposed to know, but went with ignoring her. Instead, he started to move forward to get a better view, before realizing he hadn’t heard the end of the DI’s argument with Sherlock. He stopped in his steps, and looked at him, raising his eyebrows to ask for permission. Lestrade just threw up his hands in defeat with a resigned, “Oh, do as he says.”

Sherlock hadn’t actually said to do anything, so John just kind of moved to hover by the window where there was a better view, so he could watch the man work.  

“Jennifer Wilson,” Lestrade informed Sherlock somewhat grudgingly. “Unknown cause of death. Some kids found her early this morning, as you know, but other than that, we don’t know much.”

Sherlock muttered something that sounded like, “Not a surprise,” as he continued to stare, tilting his head as he gazed at the woman on the floor.  John watched his silver eyes shine as they darted over the prone figure. Most of what he was doing made little sense to John as he began to move around the body, running fingers under her collar and removing her wedding band to inspect.  

There was a sound of shocked outrage from the corner of the room. “What are you doing? Put that back!”

John just managed not to turn and look at the woman- Jennifer, apparently- but still jumped a little at the sudden outburst. He couldn’t quite help the exasperated sound he smothered as she fairly stomped over to him and demanded, “Tell him to stop!”

Sherlock had already slid her ring back onto her finger and was typing on his phone now, so he just glanced at her and gave a shrug he managed to make look like a roll of his shoulders, trying to get a what do you want me to do about it? message across. She made another angry sound and tried grabbing for Sherlock, but being dead her arms went right through his torso, and John had to bite his lip to keep from laughing when it made her so angry that she started kicking at his shins. Sherlock, naturally, felt nothing, but he did glance up and give John’s face a quick sweep before going back to his phone. When swiping at his cellphone did nothing, Jennifer seemed to resign herself to being mute to everyone but John-- and he was going to have words with her about that-- and came huffing back his way to stand next to him with her arms crossed and an indignant expression that went lost on the other two men in the room.  

“John,” Sherlock suddenly barked from his position crouched next to the corpse and gestured him over. John stood staring at him for a second, sure he was misunderstanding, before Sherlock made an impatient gesture, waving him over more firmly. Grabbing his cane, John made his way to where Sherlock stood, and then awkwardly lowered himself to kneel on the floor. He kept still waiting for further instructions as Sherlock’s silver eyes watched him before he finally said, “Tell me what you see.”

“What, you want my medical opinion?” he asked and at Sherlock’s nod said, “She’s dead.”

“Yes, thank you for that,” he said sarcastically, but the corner of his lip twitched, like he wanted to smile. “But I was hoping for a bit more.”

John briefly considered refusing because the level of weirdness in inspecting a person’s corpse was something he should only have to deal with once a month at most, but refusing would look ridiculous. Not that Sherlock seemed to have any problem with ridiculous. It took only the space of perhaps half a second to decide on a course of action and he focused on what she’d told him earlier, inspecting her fingernails and eyes, sniffing at her mouth.  

“Definitely asphyxiated. Probably passed out and choked on her own vomit, but I don’t smell alcohol on her breath, so maybe… poison?”

“Yes!”

John jerked at the dead woman’s excited shout, but quickly adjusted his leg to make it look like a wince of pain. Sherlock didn’t move, but his gaze flicked from the corpse to John, running down his leg and back to his face. “You’ve read the papers; you know what it is.”

It took John a moment to put the facts together. It was hard to concentrate with the flash of the sparkling neon pink glow pacing back and forth in his peripheral vision. He looked toward the other wall as he tried to ignore it. Poison, and she was alone…  

“The serial suicides?” he asked, and Sherlock’s smirk looked like approval as he stood swiftly.

But no, that wasn’t right, was it? She’d said that she’d been killed, not that she’d taken her own life. Unless he’d gotten it wrong, which was possible. The really annoying thing was that he couldn’t just ask her now that she could tell him, not with people in the room.  

Not, apparently, that he needed to, because in the next moment she breathed, “No, that’s not right. I didn’t! It wasn’t me!”

“Sherlock,” the DI said, distracting the man enough that John could chance a glance at Jennifer to at least let her know that he was hearing her. “Time’s up. I need everything you’ve got.”

John grabbed his cane to lever himself awkwardly off the floor, nearly falling over again as Jennifer Wilson suddenly stood right by his ear to demand, “Tell him that he’s wrong! I didn’t do this!”

Dear god, this wasn’t fair. He made a placating gesture as unobtrusively as he could. Thankfully she stopped talking, but he could feel her agitation vibrating through the air and his skin began to crawl with it. He rubbed at his arm absently, focusing on Sherlock, his hands and his voice, trying to ground himself with the living as the tension in the room ratcheted up until John felt pulled taught, every muscle tense and he felt ready to break.

To be honest, though, it was probably Sherlock’s fault.  

“She’s in her late thirties, most likely works in the media going by her clothes. Coming from Cardiff and intending to stay in London for one night going by the size of her suitcase. She’s been unhappily married for at least ten years, and had a string of lovers, but none of them knew she was married.”

Jennifer went suddenly still beside him, her shock like a void in the air around her as she breathed, “How-?” at the same moment Lestrade said, “Oh for God’s sake, if you’re just making this up-”

“Her wedding ring,” Sherlock said with the air of someone who was used to being doubted. “All of her jewelry is clean but her wedding ring- state of her marriage there, except the inside, which means it was regularly removed, but not for her job. So, affair. Her coat is slightly damp, but there hasn’t been any rain in London for the past few hours and her umbrella is still in her coat pocket, so there was heavy wind. She had a suitcase, so we know she came a decent distance, and we know from the size it wasn’t for more than one night or so. But her coat is still damp, so she couldn’t have come far. Where has there been rain and heavy wind in the last few hours fitting that radius?” Sherlock held up his phone and John just caught the weather map on the glowing screen before he pulled it away. “Cardiff.”

“Oh my God,” Jennifer breathed.

“That’s brilliant.” It was out of John’s mouth before he quite knew he was planning to say it and only felt a little bad at the offended noise Jennifer made.

Sherlock turned to look at him, a mild sort of surprise on his face before the DI pulled his attention away by asking, “Why do you keep saying suitcase?”

“Right,” Sherlock said, turning to sweep a look around the room. “Where is it? She’ll have a phone or an organizer. You’ll want to look at those, find out who Rachel is.”

Oh, shit. John swallowed and pursed his lips, looking out the window. What was he supposed to do with that? He couldn’t say anything, let anyone know he knew because, for God’s sakes, he’d been found with the body. His alibi was shit as it was- what were they going to think if he told them he knew what her dying words, carved into the floor, meant?

“That’s what she was writing on the floor then. Rachel?” Lestrade asked.

There was no answer for several moments and John turned his head to see Sherlock staring at him again like he could rip John’s brain out and into his hands through force of will alone. John stared back as placidly as he could manage until Sherlock seemed to come to some conclusion and it was an eerily physical feeling when his gaze turned away. He turned to Lestrade and said, as if there had been no pause, “Of course it’s Rachel. What else would it be?”

The DI scratched his head for a moment, staring at the carved floor. “Well Anderson said-”

“Oh God,” Sherlock groaned dramatically. “Don’t finish that sentence. There’s far too much stupid in the room as it is.”

The DI’s tone was warning when he said, “Sherlock-” but Sherlock ignored him, demanding, “The suitcase. Now please, if you’d like to wrap this up sometime this month.”

With restraint John admired, the DI only slightly gritted his teeth as he informed his consultant, “There was no case.”

Sherlock went abruptly still, eyes narrowed as if calculating something. John glanced toward Lestrade, but he looked as clueless as John felt. It went on for a few long seconds and John was about to ask if something was wrong when Sherlock jerked suddenly and then went running from the room shouting. The DI followed after, muttering under his breath, and John started to move after them before remembering the woman he was supposed to be helping. He turned to her and gestured that she should follow as he made his way out the door as quickly as he could. He hit the landing just in time to catch the tail end of a rant about serial killers and mistakes, and then a shouted, “Pink!” before there was a swirl of dark coat pounding out of the house and John was left feeling oddly… abandoned. Which was ridiculous, obviously. Even more ridiculous was the fact that when he turned to get Jennifer Wilson’s attention and he saw that she was gone, it only got worse.  

He hesitated for a moment, debating on whether to check if she was still in the room, but with forensics moving back in after Sherlock’s abrupt departure he decided to get out of everyone’s way and started making his way down the stairs. He hugged the wall as he made his way down, his cane bulky and awkward on the narrow stairs crawling with people. It took him so long to reach the front door, that by the time he got outside, his knuckles were white on the cane’s handle with suppressed aggravation. He stopped once more outside to look back inside the house, but the dead woman was still nowhere he could see. Which was mildly insulting, because apparently now that Sherlock was on the case he was no longer needed. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to find him if she did need him, either.

John huffed an annoyed breath through his nose and made his way toward the street to find a cab.  He was stopped at the police line by the same dark female cop who’d tried to stop him earlier, but this time the hostility-curiosity ratio tipped in his favor and she just looked at him before demanding, “Who are you? You’re not his friend- he doesn’t have friends. So what are you doing with him?”

“I’m no one,” John answered and ignored the familiar stab of the truth.  

The hostility was beginning to make a comeback as she crossed her arms, trying to stare him down. “And you just happened to be here with a corpse right before he shows up? And despite the fact that you’re obviously lying about why you were here, he hasn’t said a word about it?”

John scowled at her. “What reason would he have to hide anything? We just met; we barely know each other.”

“Look,” she said as if he’d never opened his mouth, “whatever it is you’ve got into with him, just get out now. He’s a psychopath and he likes manipulating people almost as much as he loves this.” She made a circular motion with her finger, indicating the crime scene. “You’re better off without him.”

John’s smile was nothing like genuine as he answered, “I’ll keep that in mind.” He turned toward the police tape that the officer still had her hand resting on, staring at it to let her know just how done with the conversation he was and nearly just walked right through it when she hesitated. After a moment though, she let out a sigh and lifted it high enough for him to shuffle under and, when he gave her a nod of thanks, she acknowledged it with a curt nod of her own.    

The sun had come up when John was inside the building, but it was still early enough that it wasn’t quite impossible to find a cab, though it took a good twenty minutes of pacing the street and throwing up his arm to get one to stop. Returning to the flat held a feeling reminiscent of disappointment and anticlimax as he put his keys down on his desk and pulled off his coat. He stared at his desk for a minute, a thought forming in his mind as he gazed at his laptop, before he turned and wandered into the kitchen to fix a cup of tea. He’d been dragged to see a corpse by the undead in the middle of the night, arrested, and interrogated all in the space of a few hours. But it was Sherlock who filled his head now with keen, pale eyes, dark curls, dramatic, graceful gestures, and a voice as sharply brilliant as his gaze and dear god, John was fucked, wasn’t he?  

This moving in with him thing was a bad idea, a terrible idea, because how was he going to keep anything from the man? It was only a matter of time until he did, and then what? Would he assume John was cracked? Or worse, would he actually believe him? Not only that, but he worked with murder victims. The amount of death that had to cling to him would drive John mad, all of those half-formed spirits that lingered with no sense or purpose, just swathing the room in despair until they finally faded away. He hadn’t sensed any yet, but living in close quarters with someone so attracted to death couldn’t mean anything good to someone like John.

John’s phone buzzed on his desk, chiming with a text message. He wandered over, wondering what the hell Harry could want when he was in the middle of a crisis, and picked it up, stilling in shock when he saw the message.

Baker Street. Come at once if convenient.- SH

As he was standing there, staring at it, another message came through.

If inconvenient, come anyway.- SH

He huffed a laugh at it and shook his head, snapping the phone shut and shoving it into his pocket. No, definitely not. John had lived his fair share of bad ideas and worse consequences, and this one would rank the top of the list of worst. He lowered himself into his desk chair, starting up his laptop to stare at the blank blog page in front of him. He wondered if he could edit his night into something his therapist wouldn’t have him committed for. He’d just rested his fingers on the keys when his pocket buzzed again. He paused, fighting the urge to pull it out before giving in and looking.

Could be dangerous.- SH

John waited a few seconds for his instinctive response to pass, rapping his knuckles on the desk as he fought with himself. Then, with an enthusiastic curse, John grabbed his jacket off his chair, snatching up his wallet and his keys before slamming out the door.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to Wtchcool for pointing out a (really embarrassing) list of errors in chapter four. They're all fixed now, except for one with an extra article around the word "pocket," but I swear I'm going back for that one.
> 
> Also, all the Diet Coke in the nation to my be- er, editor, spiffocity, for EDITING chapter five, because if you all would have had to deal with my apparent obsession with commas, it would not have been pretty. 
> 
> (Spiffocity is, apparently, not a beta but an ALPHA, not matter how many times I try to explain what a beta is. #willfullyignorant)


	6. Chapter Six

Even if John hadn’t had the address for Baker Street shoved into his wallet, it was scarred into his brain, and as he got out of the cab and looked up at the black door marked 221, he had the surreal sense that he could find his way back here from anywhere. Which was obviously just the lack of sleep talking, he thought as he pulled himself up the steps. He grabbed the off-kilter gold-plated door knocker, rapped twice, then stepped back and leaned on his cane to wait. After a few seconds, there was a shouted demand on the other side of the door, and even with his limited exposure to it, John easily recognized the voice as Sherlock’s. He’d stood there long enough to wonder if he’d been invited inside before the door opened. It wasn’t Sherlock who answered the door, however; it was an older woman who was smiling as if she’d been waiting for him and her voice was warm as she said, “You must be Doctor Watson.”

“Ah…” John said, glancing past her into the flat. “Yes, hello.”

“I’m Mrs. Hudson,” she said as she shook his hand, and then held the door open for him to walk through. “I’m your landlady. Sherlock told me that you’d be moving in,” she added at his surprised glance.

“Did he?” John asked, torn between irritation and amusement. “What else did he say?”

Before she could answer (and there was an answer, because she opened her mouth with a glint in her eye), he heard a call from up the staircase of, “Mrs. Hudson, bring John up here and stop harassing him.”

Mrs. Hudson gave him a you-know-how-he-is look and started walking up the stairs, gesturing that he should follow her up. He did, navigating awkwardly with his cane and swearing under his breath when he knocked into the banister. By the time he got to the top, Mrs. Hudson was smiling at him sympathetically and John gave her a tight smile in return that he hoped didn’t look too much like fuck you. Either she missed it or ignored it, because she walked into the flat calling, “Tea, Doctor Watson?”

“Uh, yes… please.” John blinked at the flat from where he stood in the doorway. Sherlock was sitting on a dark leather chair, staring intently at something on the coffee table in front of him. The room looked like someone had come in and dumped everything they owned wherever it would fit and left it. Some of it had obviously been unpacked or someone had begun to unpack it. The boxes were haphazard, ready to tip and spill papers and folders all over the floor with a strong breath. John resisted the urge to blow on one to prove it.

Mrs. Hudson was tutting over the mess in a resigned sort of way, and John stared after her into the kitchen where she was sorting through what looked like chemistry equipment. She finally pulled out a kettle with a small sound of triumph and carried it back into the sitting room. “Kettle, Sherlock?” she asked, holding it up for him to see.

He made a distracted, noncommittal sound as he continued staring at whatever was on the coffee table. She wasn’t having any of that though, and walked a few steps closer to put the kettle in front of his face and shake it a bit. “Sherlock, dear, the kettle. Is it safe for tea?”

He tipped his head away with a sound of irritation and a snapped, “Yes, it’s fine,” pushing her away with restrained impatience.

She regarded him dubiously for a moment before shaking her head and heading back into the kitchen.

What the hell was going on?

He stood for another moment watching Sherlock stare before deciding he’d had enough. He moved awkwardly through the maze of stuff everywhere, examining what had been taken out and set up, and glancing through what was still in the boxes. The skull on the mantle gave him pause for a second, and he couldn’t help giving the room a quick visual sweep before determining that everyone in the room was alive. At the moment, anyway.

“So,” John said after a moment, clearing his throat. “All this stuff…”

It took Sherlock a second to respond, and when he did, only half of his attention was on John. “What?”

“It’s all yours, then?”

“Of course it’s mine,” he replied, his brows dropping in aggravated confusion. He finally looked up then, like he was about to say something else, when he seemed to actually catch sight of the room. John wasn’t sure it was possible, but he could have sworn Sherlock looked... abashed. He stood up suddenly and began shuffling strewn papers into piles, shoving file folders and boxes to the side until there was an unoccupied chair John hadn’t even noticed.

“Obviously I can clean things up a bit,” Sherlock said, and damn the man if he didn’t make it sound like he was doing John a favor by offering to leave a square foot of unoccupied space in a flat he was supposed to be moving in to.

Not much different than the army, actually.

John settled his cane next to the newly cleared chair and lowered himself into it, taking a cup of tea from Mrs. Hudson with a grateful smile as she handed one to him.

“There’s a bedroom upstairs,” she told him conversationally as she set another on the table. Sherlock stepped up into his chair to settle on the seat back again. “If you’ll be needing two rooms, that is.”

John looked at her for a moment as he waited for her to clarify, because he couldn’t have understood that right, but she was gazing blandly back at him with a hopeful sort of smile. Like she wanted him to tell her he’d be sharing a room with… oh, God.

“Of course we’ll be needing the two,” he said firmly, and glanced to Sherlock for some backup. He got none, of course, because apparently neither he nor Mrs. Hudson were even in the room.

“It’s fine, dear,” she assured him with a pat on his shoulder. “We’ve got all sorts around here.”

He was about to renew his protest when something in her tone caught his attention and he stopped to just look at her. She was smiling at him, warm and accepting, but also curious and a bit sympathetic. He wasn’t sure it was the kind of smile you gave someone when talking about their sexual preferences.

Just in case, he told her, “That’s great, really, but no. We’ll be using two different bedrooms.” And then, just so he wouldn’t sound like a complete arse, he raised his tea and said, “Thank you.”

She raised her eyebrows, giving a little disappointed sigh before she said, “If you say so,” and wandered into the kitchen to make some more noise. Cleaning up or something, John wasn’t sure. Didn’t really care, because he suddenly noticed what, exactly, it was that was sitting on the coffee table that had Sherlock so enthralled.

“That’s the case,” he blurted out, and then, since apparently he was incapable of uttering one stupid thing at a time, clarified, “The pink lady’s case.”

“Well done, John,” Sherlock drawled sarcastically as he continued to stare at it.

John moved to the edge of his chair to peer inside at what had Sherlock so intrigued. All he could see was a pile of clothing that looked like it had been dug through and tossed back in, and a small toiletries bag full of makeup. He glanced up at Sherlock with a raised eyebrow, and that, for some reason got his attention.

“Oh, perhaps I should mention I’m not the one who killed her,” he said with less venom than John would expect from that sort of sentence.

“I didn’t say you were,” John remarked blandly and scowled slightly when Sherlock made a scoffing noise.

“Why not? It would be the logical conclusion.”

John had nothing to say to that besides the fact that if he were ever to encounter a murderer he’d expect to see at least one angry spirit hanging around, so instead he asked, “Do people often assume that you’re the killer?”

Sherlock tossed his head lightly. “From time to time.”

John looked at the case for a long moment, not sure he wanted an answer to his next question. “How did you get it?”

“The killer must have driven her to Lauriston Gardens, because he could only have her case if she’d left it in the car by accident. A case of this color would attract too much attention, particularly if the killer was a male, which is statistically more likely. He would have had to get rid of it quickly to avoid suspicion, so I checked every back alley skip within a five mile driving distance from Lauriston Gardens and…” He made a dramatic sweeping gesture over the case, his mouth set in a smug grin.

John felt a rueful smile tug at his lips. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re an idiot. No, no, no,” he said with a placating gesture when John made a small indignant sound. “Don’t be like that. Practically everyone is.”

“Comparatively,” John murmured, but Sherlock didn’t seem interested in the conversation any more. He lapsed into a contemplative silence while John watched him think. John was just beginning to feel awkward and wondering if he should see if Mrs. Hudson needed anything or perhaps wanted to show him the bedroom that he would not be sharing with Sherlock (not that he was trying to prove a point or anything) when a shrill, familiar voice shouted next to his ear, “Hey! That’s mine!”

John jerked in his seat and swore loudly, cringing almost immediately as Sherlock’s gaze snapped toward him in alarm and what could have been concern. Mrs. Hudson called from the kitchen, “Everything all right, Dr. Watson?”

“Yeah, yes,” he replied quickly with sheepish irritation at himself, avoiding Sherlock’s scrutiny as he tried fighting the blush he felt coming on. He knocked his foot into his cane, and latched onto the idea with, “Just… my damn leg.”

Mrs. Hudson made some reply, but it was lost under the noise of Jennifer Wilson’s cries of outrage over the state of her clothing. John gritted his teeth against the urge to remind her that she was deceased, actually, and the dead didn’t wear anything other than what they’d died in. Not that he’d seen, anyway. Then again, his experience had almost been exclusively limited to fatigues up to that point, so who the hell knew.

Which really wasn’t the point. The point was that they were trying to help catch her killer, and whether or not her clothes ended up neatly folded or dumped in the Thames in the end was irrelevant. Or it should have been, but John had seen people less livid over their children being injured.

He ignored her the best he could as she ranted, sparking a neon pink path behind herself as she paced from the window to the coffee table and back, occasionally shouting at Sherlock about common decency and rights to privacy. He was going to have to set up some kind of code of communication with her if she was going to be hanging around so much, he thought, even if it was just so that he could tell her to shut up for a minute so that he could hear what the actual living people were trying to tell him. Mrs. Hudson was saying something about a bad hip and herbal soothers, but all he could hear was Jennifer becoming more and more aggravated, and then suddenly, as John was massaging his temples to stave off the inevitable headache, she rounded on him with, “If you’re not going to help, why are you even here?”

He stopped and stared at the floor for a second. That was a very good question, actually.

“Sorry,” John said just a bit louder than he probably needed to, but it was hard to gauge the right volume with all the extra noise that only he could hear. “But what exactly am I doing here?”

Sherlock barely tilted his head toward John in acknowledgement, giving only a distracted, “Hmm?” in response. Apparently, the non-sentient suitcase was now more engrossing than John was, though Sherlock seemed to be staring more through it than into it.

“I got your text,” John said, and then when that got no response, clarified with, “It sounded urgent.”

Sherlock smirked at that and said something, but John lost it over the sound of Jennifer leaning in toward him and shouting, “Stop ignoring me!”

John closed his eyes and huffed out a stabilizing breath, reminding himself that he could not actually hit the dead. Or hadn’t found a way to yet anyway, though he was willing to try at the moment. Instead he put up a hand next to his ear in what he hoped appeared to be a casual gesture but would also communicate to Jennifer that he could hear her, and then asked, “Sorry, what was that?”

“A text, John,” Sherlock repeated testily, and John thought he sounded a little louder, like maybe he thought John was a bit hard of hearing. “I need you to send one for me to the number on my desk.”

“Oh,” John said, looking past him toward the desk that he assumed Sherlock was talking about. The one about five feet closer to Sherlock than it was to John. It didn’t appear to be a joke though, so John levered himself out of his chair and went to grab the scrap of paper off the desk, pulling his phone out along the way. He typed in the number and then tilted his head toward Sherlock to ask, “What’s the message?”

“Type this exactly,” Sherlock enunciated sharply. “What happened at Lauriston Gardens? I must have blacked out. 22 Northumberland Street. Please come.”

John had barely got the first sentence in when Sherlock asked, “Have you finished?”

“Yeah, hang on,” John snapped back. He finished the message while Sherlock occasionally made impatient noises and hit send. “There, it’s done, okay?”

“Excellent,” Sherlock said, and bounced out of his seat to pace in front of the window.

John watched him for a few moments before Jennifer was suddenly standing at his shoulder, and he started, biting back a curse. She was squinting at the sent message on his screen. “Why are you sending me a text if I’m dead?”

John blinked at her and then down at the phone. No. That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right.

“Sherlock,” John started hesitantly. “Who did I just send a text to?”

“The case, John,” Sherlock said, jabbing his finger at it, which made no sense whatsoever. “Look at it. Tell me what’s missing.”

“I don’t- what the hell does that have to do-”

“Her phone,” Sherlock said as if it should be completely obvious. “Where’s her mobile phone? It wasn’t on her body, and it isn’t in the case, so where is it?”

John stared at the suitcase for a minute, a suspicion forming in his mind. One he really didn’t want to think about. “Did I just… did you just have me text a murderer?”

Sherlock smiled at him in what seemed like pride, whether because he thought he was clever or because John figured it out, he didn’t know. Either way, John wanted to punch him in the face.

As if on cue, John’s phone started ringing and he looked down with some amount of wariness at the blocked number on the screen. There was no message when it finished ringing, and John looked up at Sherlock with a raised, questioning eyebrow.

Sherlock made a sound of triumph, as if he could read the screen from where he stood. “Think about it. If just anyone had picked up her phone, they’d ignore a text like that. But the murderer would panic!” He swept toward the door, grabbing up his long, dark coat as he went. “Come on, John! We have a serial killer to catch!”

John’s protest died on his lips as Sherlock disappeared from sight. He turned to Jennifer to tell her to stay here, please, and not get in the way, but she seemed to know what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and followed Sherlock quickly.

It occurred to John that he didn’t actually have to go. He could stay here and watch telly, have a cup of tea, and not try to appear as if he couldn’t speak with the dead while also trying to reassure her that he could hear her. He thought about what Sally had said, how Sherlock got off on all of this.

And then he thought about the text sitting on his phone right now, and the reason he was even standing in the room. Could be dangerous.

John cursed soundly as he grabbed his cane and then thumped down the stairs after them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, sorry for the lateness, but I work on my alpha's (by which I mean beta- don't ask) schedule, and she was pretty busy this week. Also, she mentioned that stuff should start happening before people get bored, so in the next chapter you'll get... well, stuff. Or something.


	7. Chapter Seven

Sherlock was already muttering to himself not two steps from the door by the time John caught up to him. John easily fell into place beside him, and then suppressed an aggravated sigh when Jennifer slotted into place on John’s other side.

“Where are we going?” John asked as they started off down the street. John had no trouble keeping up with the taller man’s stride, even with his cane, and it occurred to him that Sherlock had to be adapting his normal pace for him. The flash of irritation that ran through him at the thought was a little surprising, but then if he couldn’t keep up with the man’s mind- which was completely hopeless- then he at least wanted to be able to keep up with him physically.

Walking, running, that sort of _physically_. Not… anything else that he definitely was not thinking about. Not out in public, anyway, and certainly not right next to the man in question.

“Twenty-two Northumberland Street’s just a five minute walk from here.” Sherlock pointed vaguely down the street, which helped not at all. “If the killer is brilliant, and he is, I can tell,” he said, smiling to himself like he possessed some kind of inner knowledge of the man (and who the hell knew, maybe he did), “then he’ll show up.”

John wasn’t an idiot- he had made it through medical school after all- but that statement did not sound logical. “Wait, if he’s brilliant…” John paused again to try thinking it through, but it still made no sense. “Why would he do something that could get him caught? Does he want to be caught?”

“No,” Sherlock said and there was the barest hint of a sigh in there, John knew it. “Well, not exactly. What he wants is appreciation. The frailty of genius, John, is that it needs an audience.”

John heard Jennifer snort sardonically next to him and his lips twitched when he asked, “Really?”

Sherlock seemed to miss the point entirely and stopped walking for a moment to peer down the street. “Someone must have seen her taken, must have seen all of them, so why did no one notice? Who hunts in the middle of a crowd without anyone seeing? Someone everyone trusts.”

John tilted his head toward the ground as if thinking, but turned his eyes toward Jennifer and raised an eyebrow. She gave an irritated huff and shook her head. “I told you, I don’t know. I get off at the station, and then it’s all blank until I’m in that room. There’s bits and pieces,” she continued, sounding frustrated, “but it’s like a horrible nightmare. Not much of it makes sense. The man though.” She put fingers to her temples and pressed until her fingertips turned white, as if she could force the memory to come. “I remember a man with two voices, and his eyes were… they’re weren’t right-”

“John,” Sherlock said loudly, and John snapped toward him. From Sherlock’s tone, it wasn’t the first time he’d called. “I asked if you were hungry. It’s still a bit early, but you haven’t eaten in at least twelve hours, and I know a place.”

“I…” John hesitated, his fingers tightening on the grip of his cane.

Sherlock watched his face curiously and John fought the urge to look guiltily at Jennifer. He couldn’t help but feel that he was abandoning her, but if she really didn’t know anything, then his time was better spent helping the detective. _Consulting_ detective- whatever.

“Yeah, sure, sounds good,” he finally answered, far too late to be sounding as casual as he did, but Sherlock only nodded and gestured him into the restaurant they were standing in front of. The waiter that showed them to their window table seemed to know Sherlock, and John watched in bemusement as a large man approached them, smiling openly. “Sherlock!” he said with a trace of an Italian accent. “So good to see you!”

“Angelo,” Sherlock greeted absently as he settled himself into one of the seats and stared out at the street.

Angelo seemed completely unperturbed by his behavior, and instead turned his warm smile on John. “And who is this?”

“John,” he answered, and shook the man’s hand before settling into his own seat. Sherlock looked over at John’s raised eyebrow, then up at the Italian man as if just realizing that they’d never actually met.

“Oh. John, this is Angelo. He owns the restaurant.”

“This man,” Angelo said with pride, pointing at Sherlock. “proved I was innocent, got me off a murder charge.”

“I proved it a bit,” Sherlock muttered, attention back on the street. He followed up a few seconds later with, “I managed to prove that Angelo was in a different area of town stealing cars when the actual murder took place.”

“Saved my life,” Angelo said with the same good humor, but more solemnly. He turned to look at Sherlock then. “Anything you want, Sherlock, free of charge for you and your date.”

John may not have been on top of his game as of late, but he wasn’t quite so slow yet that he missed the implication. “What? No, I’m not his-”

“I’ll get a candle for the table- more romantic,” Angelo continued as if he hadn’t heard John at all and then _winked_ and John was so confused he didn’t even blush. He looked to Sherlock for some help, but the man was checked out, obviously, totally intent on the street outside.

There was a familiar snort of laughter next to him and John absolutely did not jump in his seat or have to check the impulse to stab Jennifer with a fork.

“Look at you two,” she said with amusement and John could see her leaning on the table with her chin resting in her hands in his peripheral vision. “Bit of an odd couple, but it kind of works, doesn’t it?”

No, he wanted to tell her, it didn’t. It couldn’t, actually, because they weren’t a thing. John didn’t think he’d want them to be a thing even if it were possible, not being the way he was now. And not with Sherlock looking every few minutes like he wanted to pull John apart and look inside. John wasn’t sure himself what Sherlock would find there, and didn’t want to know actually, so it was better to just let this one go. And by the way, wasn’t she supposed to be bemoaning the state of her clothes and, oh, maybe her loss of life?

 _Bloody bipolar,_ he thought as Angelo brought them a bottle of wine and- yes, there it was, damn him, a white tea light candle. He lit it with a small flourish and Sherlock nodded thanks to him absently. It was John that Angelo winked at, though, _again_ , and he could only watch the man walk away in confusion. It was just going on eleven o'clock in the morning, how romantic could it get? And who in their right mind would-?

Oh. Well there was the answer right there, really.

Jennifer sighed loudly next to him and tapped her fingernails against the table. Unlike the corpse sitting on ice in a morgue somewhere, they were perfectly manicured. There was no trace of the cracked, bleeding, torn cuticles and John stared down at them, thinking of the equally torn up floor and wondered why she hadn’t brought up Rachel. Had it been Rachel? It must have been. Unless Sherlock was wrong, but judging by her reactions to everything else he’d said about her, he’d been nothing but correct so far.

He really needed to get her alone somewhere to talk to her, but the last time they’d been alone, she’d refused to talk to him. Although at the time, it had seemed more like she was unable to. Or maybe it was a come-and-go thing with her. Could that happen? John wasn’t sure, but just because he’d never seen it before, didn’t mean it was impossible.

He looked up as the waiter brought him a plate of food, blinking in surprise since he hadn’t actually ordered anything yet. It was too early in the day to eat anything heavy, so he was grateful to see that what had been set in front of him was a large mediterranean-looking salad and a small portion of pasta, as well as the obligatory basket of breadsticks. He nodded his thanks and reached for his water glass, bypassing the wine. It was a bit early in the day for him to be ingesting any alcohol, thoughtful (if misguided) as the gesture had been.

John was surprised that the place was even open yet. Although he couldn’t help but noticed as he glanced around that he and Sherlock were the only two there. Besides Jennifer, anyway, and she didn’t really count, did she?

Not that she wasn’t trying, he thought in bemusement as she groaned rather dramatically and stared longingly at the bread basket. “This isn’t fair. I’m supposed to be dead.” She turned to give John an accusatory stare, as if this was all his fault. “How can I be hungry if I’m dead?”

He snorted into his water glass, then grimaced as that, of all things, finally caught Sherlock’s attention. The man turned to raise an eyebrow at him, asking without saying a word what was so funny.

John just shook his head, and pointed at Sherlock’s side of the table with his fork. “Aren’t you eating?”

John wasn’t exactly the master of deflection and Sherlock still looked curious when he answered, “I never eat when I’m on a case- it slows me down.”

“Ah,” John answered as if it made perfect sense. He’d been through medical school, though, and it didn’t take an MD to know that was total shit.

“No, but seriously,” Jennifer said beside John, and took a useless swipe at a breadstick. “That’s just not fair. How come he doesn’t want to eat and he can have whatever he wants but I’m _starving_ , and just because I’m dead I don’t get anything?”

John stopped with a bite of food partway to his mouth and had to press his lips together against the bark of laughter in his throat. Unfortunately, Sherlock still had his attention on him and his brows dropped suspiciously as he watched John’s face. “Something the matter?”

“No,” John assured him quickly. “Just, ah, hot is all. The food, I mean.”

Thank God it hadn’t been salad on his fork.

Sherlock continued to give him that look for a few seconds before something outside the window caught his attention and he turned away. John could feel part of the man’s attention on him though, like a blanketing weight, and he redoubled his efforts to ignore the dead woman.

She wasn’t going to make it easy, he thought as she started nattering on about food and calories, and how absolutely _stupid_ it was that now that calories had no effect on her figure, she couldn’t have any. He barely stopped himself from jerking away from her when she leaned over his plate to examine his food and give him calorie estimations for what he was eating, but he did shift a bit away from her so there was no chance of touching. The last thing he needed right now was to get caught in a psychic feedback loop, and he’d be damned if he was going to chance getting any residual from this one. He could just imagine a month of checking the impulse to buy anything pink that crossed his path.

The idea made him put an extra inch or so between them.

“Oh, my God,” Sherlock muttered as if to himself with some degree of vehemence and then more loudly, “Shut _up_!”

Jennifer stopped talking suddenly, and both he and John looked across the table, John with his jaw open and a fork partway to his mouth. “Sorry?”

Sherlock looked at him and the amount of irritation he projected at John was confusing, since John hadn’t been doing anything but eating. “You, thinking so loudly! It’s impossible to concentrate on anything else!”

“Sorry,” John said, firmly setting down his fork and then pinning Sherlock with a hard stare. “Are you suggesting that I _think more quietly?”_

“If you could manage that, it would be wonderful,” Sherlock answered, and John wasn’t sure whether he had missed the sarcasm or ignored it.

John wasn’t sure what to say to that. He settled for nodding like he knew what the hell he was agreeing to and going back to his food. Possibly stabbing it a bit aggressively.

“Your boyfriend,” Jennifer said contemplatively as she regarded Sherlock across the table and John bit back a groan. “He’s not the sweet romantic type, is he?”

This whole situation, John decided, required him to be a little less sober, and he reached out for the untouched wine bottle, only to have Sherlock snatch it away from him.

“No,” Sherlock said at John’s noise of protest, “I may need you, and you’ll need to be sober.”

“Need me for _what?”_ John wanted to know, but Sherlock had gone still again and was staring out the window. This time though, his body was all straight tension, and John briefly thought of a bloodhound.

“What?” he asked and turned to look out the window. Nothing immediately caught his eye, and he gave the street another scan, looking for anything shady or unusual. He should have known that it wouldn’t be so obvious; someone who had gotten away for so long would know how to hide. Still, he couldn’t see what had Sherlock so keyed up. “What is it?”

Sherlock made a shushing sound and cut his hand across the table sharply in a demand for silence. His brow was drawn down in either concentration or confusion. “What’s he doing?”

“What’s who- hey!” John shouted as Sherlock bolted up out of his seat and ran for the door, snatching up his coat on his way out. John was out his own chair and running after the madman before he was fully aware that his feet had even hit the ground. Dodging oncoming traffic in the cross street in front of the restaurant was an afterthought as John tried to keep his eyes on the dark figure flying down the street, shouting out apologies as he collided with pedestrians. He’d finally gotten close enough that he could reach out and grab Sherlock’s coat with enough effort when Sherlock suddenly cut down an alleyway and John swore as he slid passed it, twisting just in time to catch the ground with his fingertips as he pushed off in the right direction.

Sherlock sounded dishearteningly far away as he called, “Come on, John!”

John put on an extra burst of speed at the call, like the sound of that voice was his fuel, and hit Sherlock’s heels just as they exited the alley. He could see who they were after now, a figure about John’s height in blue jeans a hooded sweater, dirty trainers flying off the pavement in a blur. The hood was pulled up over the figure’s head, so John couldn’t make out anything besides a vague outline in slightly too-large clothing, but something didn’t seem right about the proportions.

There was no time to point anything out as the figure darted down another alley and John caught the sound of squealing, grinding metal and a deafening clang. Sherlock’s curse blended with the noise and he took off even faster. John was barely able to keep at his back as they pounded into the alley just in time to see a fire ladder snap back into place, but no sooner had it hit home than Sherlock was jumping and grabbing onto it, pulling it down all in one smooth motion. John nearly caught the thing in the face as Sherlock scrambled up, and had to throw his weight into getting it back down before he could follow. Sherlock was taking the metal rungs two at a time, and John felt his muscles start to burn as he struggled to keep up.

 _Oh God_ , John thought as he watched the figure continue up faster than he thought was possible. It jumped onto the last landing between floors and started up the last ladder. _Not the roof, please not the-_

He swore as it disappeared over the edge of the building and Sherlock dragged himself quickly over a second after. John was still half a ladder behind Sherlock, but he was close enough to hear Sherlock hit the roof and begin pounding across it. He had just cleared the raised edge and was landing on his feet when he heard, “Hurry _up_ , John!”

“Yeah, coming,” he panted through gritted teeth. Sherlock was closing the gap between himself and their target, and both were getting close to the other edge of the building, so John prepared himself to offer tackle-backup. Which meant he wasn’t at all prepared when the small, dark shadow hit the edge of the building and jumped, only to hit the roof of the building across and keep going.

Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when Sherlock didn’t hesitate to take a flying leap to follow.

John skid to stop at the edge of the building, gravel spraying out behind him as he dug his heels in. He panted, gauging the size of the gap and watching the two forms disappear in a growing feeling of dismay. He had nearly decided to let Sherlock have it by himself when the man glanced over his shoulder and shouted with unveiled aggravation, “ _Come on!”_

John pulled a deep breath in through his nose, backed up a few steps, and took a running start before pushing off the edge of the building into thin air. His knees jarred and his hips sent shockwaves up his spine when he made contact with the other side, but it was easily ignored in favor of trying to close the distance between himself and Sherlock. Later, he thought, he was going to be really fucking proud of himself.

The building they were on had no adjacent buildings, at least not in the direction the figure was headed in, and John again got ready for a jump-and-grab. Before he even got close enough to lunge though, it came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the building, going eerily still and straight. John sensed something wrong the second it stopped moving, and Sherlock must have felt the same, because instead of barreling right in and throwing it to the ground, he slowed to a stop five or so feet away, gasping for breath as his gaze snapped over the dark form with lowered eyebrows. John was panting and leaning over by the time he reached them, his pulse so loud in his ears, he could have counted it.

“What-?” he gasped at Sherlock, unable to even form a whole sentence yet, and that’s when he realized what was wrong. The stillness, the loose posture, the absolute lack of energy surrounding the form on the edge of the building was unnatural. There was no shift in the shoulders of labored breathing, no indication of discomfort or physical fatigue at all. It looked for all the world as if a doll had been set up and left for them to find.

“Turn around,” Sherlock called, his voice stupidly authoritative in spite of its breathlessness. “You’ve nowhere else to go.”

It was another agonizingly long second before anything happened, and John’s muscles burned and ached sharply with restraint as he waited. Finally, with a shuffling, heavy motion, the figure swung around to face them, heels snug up against the raised edge of the building. It swayed back, bending over the edge for a second, and John took a startled step forward, already reaching out to pull it back. Sherlock’s arm suddenly came out straight and strong to smack him in the chest and hold him back. John normally would have protested, but it died on his lips as he finally got a full look at who was standing in front of them.

She couldn’t have been older than ten, John thought in disbelief as he watched her regain her equilibrium and stand again with that same unnatural stillness. The hood of her oversized, dirty jacket had fallen back and her short reddish-blond hair looked oily and unwashed. There was dirt smeared on her pale face, but the dark smudges under her eyes were from something else, and even under her clothing, John could tell she was thin to the point of emaciation. Her hands, the only part of her that John could see besides her face, were frail-looking, and the skin was pale and pulled so taught, he could easily see the definition of each bone and joint in her fingers.

She was sick, that was evident with just a cursory glance, and she had the kind of all-consuming degenerative weakness that came with prolonged illness. The doctor in John was trying to reconcile what he was seeing and the headlong bolt and climb he’d just seen her do. There were only a few viable explanations he could come up with on the spot, but somehow he didn’t think PCP was doing this. Drugs, though, he thought as he looked at the unseeing stare of her grey-blue eyes, were a definite possibility. Except that anything that would depress her central nervous system like this, to the point where it didn’t seem like she was breathing, would have her passed out cold on the ground, not jumping roofs.

And then, as if the whole thing wasn’t creepy enough, her gaze swung around to lock onto John. Her face twitched violently as if she’d forgotten how to use the muscles, her mouth twisting up into a lopsided smirk. John blinked as his vision began to go fuzzy, and he put a hand out to steady himself on Sherlock’s arm as his head began to swim. 

“John?” Sherlock said beside him, grabbing his arm to support him as John just shook his head.

 _Fine_ , he wanted to say, _I’m fine_ , but the words wouldn’t come. He quickly forgot them as the face of the girl in front him began to shift and morph, and a sickly red-brown glow coalesced around her until suddenly she snapped back into focus. Or no, he thought in complete confusion, she hadn’t, because while he knew she was standing there, could feel the reality of it, what had come into focus wasn’t her. The glowing brown-red eyes that stared back at him weren’t dead or lifeless- they were wicked and sharp and absolutely did not belong in the face of a child. “Well,” the thing said, and the voice was just _wrong_. John blanched at the sound of it, because while the audible voice was unmistakably a child’s, there was an undertone there, something darker and deeper. “Aren’t you a surprise?”

“Who-?” John started to ask even as he fought the urge to recoil from her, but was cut off by a pained scream in his right ear.

“Rachel?” Jennifer shouted and both John and the thing in front of him jerked to look at her. She was standing less than a foot to John’s right, looking sickly horrified.

“John?” Sherlock demanded more insistently, pulling on the arm he was supporting. “What is it? What are you looking at?”

“Nothing, I’m not-” he managed to force out, but stopped as the thing in front of him tipped her head to the side and said, “Hello, mummy,” sounding so amused that it made John sick.

“Stop this!” Jennifer shrieked as she took a few angry steps forward. “Leave her alone! You promised! _You promised!”_

“Did I?” the layered voice asked and hummed thoughtfully. “I believe we had a deal. This is what happens when you don’t pull your end through.”

John felt Sherlock tense as the girl-thing reached into her pocket and pulled something out before tossing it to land at John’s feet. He flinched at the crack-smack sound of metal and plastic hitting pavement, fully expecting a small explosion. Somehow, the sight of a flat, high-end cell phone covered in pink silicone was more terrifying as it glinted up at him.

The thing winked at him. “I left my number. When you get things sorted out,” and then it flicked the girl’s sickly eyes to Sherlock indicatively, “you give me a call.”

It spun suddenly to face open air and John gave a warning shout, pulling at Sherlock’s hold, before it called over the child’s shoulder, “I have plans for you and yours, Watson.”

The last thing John heard as it tipped over the edge was Jennifer Wilson’s hysterical scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there won't be a chapter next week just because I need to build up a bit of a backlog. Clincals start hard core again next week, and I want to make sure I have a backup chapter. So ETA on Chapter Eight is May 25, in case you're wondering. So... er, yeah. I'm coming back, I promise!!


	8. Chapter Eight

If Sherlock didn’t stop complaining about that ruddy orange blanket, there was going to be a far less mysterious murder to deal with in about five seconds.

Sherlock stopped his diatribe to scan John’s face and then snorted. “I wouldn’t if I were you. They’re suspicious enough finding you at two crime scenes in one day.”

John sighed, and hung his head low, rolling his shoulders to ease some of the tension. He had noticed the curious, and sometimes outright suspicious, looks he’d been getting from the officers at the scene. Most conspicuously from Lestrade, who’d been called in at what Sherlock had called a request, but had actually been a demand- a pretty forceful demand, John thought, considering their circumstances.

“So let’s run through this one more time,” Lestrade said and glared at Sherlock’s explosively impatient sigh. “You were doing what exactly before this all started?”

“We were having lunch,” Sherlock said in a sarcastically patronizing tone. “Well, John was having lunch. I was just there.”

Sally- Sergeant Donovan, John had learned, and how the hell anyone made it that far up the chain with her attitude, he wanted to know- snorted. “Dinner and a murder. Sounds like your perfect date, Freak.” She nodded at John, her smile unattractive and spiteful. “I’d hold on to this one if I were you.”

Sherlock glared at her. “It was _lunch_ , as I said.”

“Also not a date,” John added, since it didn’t seem like Sherlock was inclined to, but he was, as usual, ignored.

“I noticed something suspicious out of the window, and we can’t be too careful with a mass murderer on the loose, can we? Naturally, I went to investigate-”

“Naturally,” John muttered sarcastically.

Sherlock gave him a mild form of the glare he’d been giving the rest of the team. “The person ran before I got close, so I gave chase, and John followed as backup. By the time we caught up to them on the roof, they went over. Fell or jumped, I’m not sure- just missed it, I suppose.”

Lestrade couldn’t have actually said _that is total bullshit_ any louder than the look on his face was saying it. “You _suppose_?”

“John’s stride,” Sherlock said, looking meaningfully down at John’s legs, “is much shorter than mine. He held me back.”

“I did n-” John started to protest, and then choked it back at Sherlock’s glare. He cleared his throat, and nodded at the DI. “I did.”

“Uh-huh,” Lestrade said with blatant skepticism. “Sorry, how fast would you say you were going?”

John stared back, trying to interpret the question. “What?”

“It’s just that earlier,” the DI pointed at John’s right leg, “I could have sworn you had a pretty bad limp.”

John blinked once and then slowly turned to look at Sherlock, his mouth open to say- well, _something_ , but nothing was coming. Sherlock looked pretty damn smug himself, and smirked at John before saying, “Psychosomatic. As I said.”

“You-” John started, and then stopped. He looked down again and flexed his leg at the knee where it hung off the back of the ambulance they were sitting in the back door of. No sharp stabs of pain met the movement, only the dull ache of recently well-used muscle. “That’s- I-”

John stopped to look up at Sherlock, who was looking more smug by the second, but John wasn’t oblivious to the cautious expectation on his face either. “Bloody amazing.”

Donovan made a gagging noise and Lestrade told her to hush it.

She said something that sounded antagonistic back to him, and Sherlock chimed in with his deep timbered sarcasm, but John missed exactly what it was as he caught sight of what was being loaded into the other ambulance on site. It was across the street and the scene was covered with people, but his attention had been caught by a flash of black and he felt his stomach drop as his brain caught up with the visual. The body bag was small, sized for a child, and John couldn’t help but think that it didn’t look nearly heavy enough as two men loaded it into the other ambulance and slammed the doors closed.

Jennifer was again nowhere to be seen, having disappeared after a brief bout of hysterics over her daughter’s body that had left John feeling heartless and guilty when he couldn’t even attempt to comfort her. John had been down to ground level without quite realizing how he’d gotten there, pushing his way through the few traumatized pedestrians who had seen what happened. He knew it was pointless, but couldn’t stop himself from checking over the small girl’s body, looking for an absent pulse. Her eyes stared up at him blankly, no longer that noxious red-brown, but a clear unremarkable blue. Jennifer was there as well, but he wasn’t sure she’d been aware of his presence at that point; her grief had been the all-consuming devastation of a soul being torn apart, and as she sat collapsed on the rooftop, screaming between wracking sobs, John had tried to block out the sound as he worked. His mind didn’t need any more fuel for his nightmares.

“Well,” Sherlock suddenly said briskly and practically bounced onto his feet. John blinked himself back to the present and look up as Sherlock continued with, “I think you’ve got all you need from us.”

“Sherlock-” Lestrade started with an edge of growl in his words, but Sherlock cut him off with an impatient noise.

“What? There’s nothing else we can give you! Besides,” he said, grabbing John’s arm to pull him up, “John’s in a bit of shock. He did just get back from the war, you know.”

John was too stunned for a moment to have any reaction, and then almost immediately felt his face turn hot and a growl built in his throat. Sherlock noticed of course, and scowled lightly at him, as if John were being dense and unreasonable. They were going to have a talk, John decided, as soon as they got back, about how John’s military history and current issues were not up for Sherlock to use as he saw fit. Possibly after John punched him in the face, although that in itself might get the point across.

At the moment, though, he really did want to get away from the whole mess to make tea and try to forget the sound of Jennifer Wilson breaking apart.

Sherlock smirked briefly as if John had said all of this out loud, and then practically flounced toward the street to get a cab. John watched him go and had the thought that he should be more disturbed by the fact that Sherlock seemed so unaffected by all of this, but he couldn’t seem to latch on to the feeling. It was exhausting trying to parse out the dichotomy of his feelings at the moment, when his guilt over being unable to help clashed with the elation he felt over the return of adrenalin and danger and being able to walk without that damned cane. He definitely was not going to try identifying how he felt about the voice that had spoken through the child or the cryptic messages it had left him until he had a strong cup of something at hand, preferably more than tea.

His brain didn’t want to cooperate though, as he nodded a goodbye to the aggravated DI and went to join Sherlock. The image of those eyes flicking to Sherlock like it meant something, like John should have understood how the man fit into any of this, wouldn’t leave him alone. John wasn’t even sure how he fit into this himself. Whoever it had been (or whatever, which was a concept John didn’t have the inclination to explore at the moment) had not only somehow known his name, but known what he could do. It also seemed to have some kind of hold on Jennifer Wilson. A deal it had said, and anything that had power- that _used_ power- like that over anyone, living or dead was not someone John wanted to have any information about him, especially _that_ information.

A cab pulled up next to Sherlock’s outstretched hand as John caught up to him. He slid in next to Sherlock, feigning interest in the view out the window as they started toward Baker Street. He’d gotten off easy so far with just intense, searching stares from Sherlock that he could almost physically feel when he turned away, but he had no delusions that he’d be able to get away without being deduced to within an inch of his life. He was a little curious to see what Sherlock came up with, since he was fairly certain it wouldn’t be the truth. Though it didn’t seem he could be completely sure of anything with Sherlock. Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t just going to pull out on his offer of a flatshare altogether. It was one thing to behave a little oddly, and quite another to be threatened by the child of a murder victim that then proceeded to jump off a roof. John wasn’t foolish enough to think Sherlock hadn’t noticed that he’d been included in that threat, either.

He was going to have to figure out a way to get the phone back, he thought as he continued to ignore Sherlock’s stare at the side of his face, and he felt his eye twitch under the weight of it. The police had undoubtedly taken it in as evidence, and he was cursing himself for not thinking to grab it before he left.

Sherlock made a sudden humming noise next to him and he stiffened in his seat, before reflexively looking over at the other man. Sherlock stuck his hand into his pocket, and pulled something out with a smirk.

“Luckily for you, I think ahead,” he said as if John had said any of his thoughts out loud.  John blinked down at Sherlock’s hand as he hit the on button of the pink phone and began running through numbers on the password screen. “How old would you say she was?”

“Who? R-?” and John choked on his words, the cough he used to cover his slip only half fake. Sherlock’s gaze snapped toward him and narrowed dangerously, continuing even after John recovered with, “The girl on the roof?”

“No,” he said sarcastically after a moment, still searching John’s face as if he could literally read it, “Donovan. Yes, of course Rachel, who else?”

John blinked in surprise. _He_ knew the girl was Rachel Wilson because he’d been on the audible side of the conversation, but how the hell did Sherlock know? He hesitated, licking his lips as he considered the best answer. “As in the _Rachel_ that Jennifer Wilson scratched into the floor? You think she was the girl on the roof?”

“John,” Sherlock said in a tone that clearly said _stop being an idiot_.

“What?” he said, a bit more stupidly then he actually was. Sherlock narrowed his eyes at him, and John just stared back blankly. Eventually, Sherlock made an irritated noise and went back to tapping at the phone’s screen and John stifled a relieved sigh.

“How did you figure that out then?” he asked after a few seconds of silence, hoping that appealing to the man’s pride would distract him long enough for John to gather himself into something more convincingly ignorant of anything strange going on.

“Genetic markers. She shared several recessive traits with Jennifer Wilson; ginger hair, the same eyes, attached earlobes. It’ll take a DNA test to confirm, but I’m sure of it. The girl was someone close to her obviously, because scratching the name into the floor would have hurt and she was dying. Sentiment. Then there’s the fact that the year the girl was born is the password to Jennifer’s phone,” Sherlock added, holding up the unlocked screen for John to see. “She was quite small for twelve, although it was most likely due to the illness. Not sure what exactly yet- something chronic with that level of muscle atrophy.”

“I agree,” John replied, as if his opinion made any difference. “That was-”

“Yes, amazing, I know,” Sherlock said, waving away the praise like it was irritating and not what he’d obviously been looking for just twenty minutes ago. “But those aren’t the answers to the really important questions, are they?”

“What really important questions?” John asked, and made the mistake of turning to make eye contact with Sherlock. He instantly felt pinned to the seat, which may have been because the other man was fairly looming over him, intimidating even sitting down. John instinctively sat up straighter and lifted his chin, refusing to be cowed. You didn’t stop growing at the age he had and not learn how to deal with this stuff.

Sherlock was unimpressed. “She said your name. How did she know you, John?”

That question at least John could answer truthfully. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Sherlock looked him over, eyes flicking over his face with a degree of attention that made John’s skin burn, and then hummed. “You aren’t lying, are you?”

“No,” John answered even though it hadn’t really sounded like a question, and he sounded convincing even to himself- mostly because it was the truth.

Sherlock turned to look out the window, his fingers tapping on his bottom lip as he seemed to consider something. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to be inclined to share it with John, and they passed the rest of the short ride back to Baker Street in silence.

 

John had been half expecting to find Jennifer Wilson in their sitting room when they got back, but the only thing waiting for him was his cane, propped against the door where John was tempted to leave it. He didn’t miss Sherlock’s smirk as he grabbed it before the other man fairly flopped into the leather arm chair and began typing away at the pink phone. John wasted no time taking it up to his room, where he fully intended to drop it in his wardrobe and never look at it again.

When he got to the top of the stairs and opened the door to his room, he realized they weren’t quite so alone as he thought.

John stood in his doorway for a moment, staring at the faintly glowing man standing in the middle of the room as he contemplated the merits of just turning around and leaving. He’d had enough of the undead for about a week, thanks, and where the hell were they all coming from anyway? He hadn’t had this many spirits clamoring for his attention in a bloody war zone, for Christ sakes.

“Doctor Watson,” the man said cordially, and nodded from where he was leaning against an umbrella. “You might wish to close the door. He’ll hear you regardless, but you can feign speaking to yourself if he can’t hear what was said.”

John hesitated only a second before shutting the door behind himself and then turning to face the man in the room. He was tall and dressed smartly in a three piece suit and exuded the air of someone with authority, but not the kind that John was used to in the army. It was a quiet kind of absolute confidence in one’s own omniscience that set John’s teeth on edge, so John’s voice was polite but cool as he asked, “Can I help you with something?”

The man’s answering smile was patronizing. “Oh, no Doctor Watson. I’m here to help you, actually.”

Well, that was new.

“Sorry,” John said, shifting on his feet. “I don’t need help, thanks.”

“But that’s not quite true, is it?” the man continued, and swung his umbrella up to rest on his shoulder as he took a few short steps toward John. John tensed and kept his posture straight, arms crossed over his chest. So far the dead hadn’t been able to physically harm him, but he’d seen enough deviation from the usual rules in the last twenty four hours to make him wary. “Tell me, what do you know about what you do?”

John pushed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Not much these days. I have a blog, and I like to mess with the colors, and there’s the appointments with my therapist twice a month-”

The man’s voice was very unamused as he firmly interrupted with, “John.”

John settled his stance, crossed his arms across his chest and stared straight back. “I talk to the dead.”

“And?” the man prodded when John didn’t add anything further, still wearing a pretentious grin.

John narrowed his eyes a bit. “Why do want to know? Who are you?”

“I was sent to help, John.” The man said, tapping his umbrella back to the floor. “To guide you in the abilities you acquired when you crossed back, and to help you find your other half, although it looks like you accomplished that without the need for assistance.”

John’s arms dropped, and his brows drew together in confusion. “Other half-? What are you on about? And wait, if you’re here to help me with- _this_ ,” he made a hand gesture between himself, the other man, the universe in general, “then where the hell were you months ago when this all started?”

The man looked vaguely apologetic in that way that customer service representatives did when you told them that one of their products had failed. “I do apologize for the delay, but I assure you that it couldn’t be avoided.”

That was just vague and condescending enough to be really irritating. “You apolo- I’ve been going _insane_ trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do!” John snapped, and the man made a hushing noise, holding up his hand as he glanced toward the door. “No,” John continued, taking two steps toward the man. He put a finger out to poke him threateningly in the chest, but pulled back at the last second. “You don’t hush me. Not after the day I’ve just had- not after the _year_ I’ve just had.”

“I understand that you’re upset-” he tried again, and John let out a harsh bark of laughter. The man stared down at him, looking firm and not at all sorry. “I do. But trust me when I say that I’m here to help you now and that I will do everything in my power to help you reach your full potential.”

 _Potential for what?_ John was going to ask, but there was a sudden perfunctory bang on the door before Sherlock charged in and looked around the room curiously. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” John said, running a hand through his hair, and didn’t miss the long-suffering sigh his would-be guide gave the room. “Fine.”

“I heard talking,” Sherlock persisted, and his eyes stopped scanning the room to rest on John.

John hummed non-committally. “Just talking to myself.”

  He turned to go put his cane in the wardrobe as he originally intended, but stopped when Sherlock said in a bemused voice, “You were telling yourself not to hush yourself?”

There was no way Sherlock missed it when John flinched, but he couldn’t stop it as he felt his ears get hot. “Ah-”

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” the umbrella man said with a roll of his eyes. “Tell him you were on the phone.”

“Um,” John said, closing the door and then turning around. “No, sorry, ah, that was me on my mobile with my sister, Harry.”

He was trying really hard not to look at the dead man in the room, but what had once been a soft creamy glow was now so bright that it was like sun reflected off of a mirror. Damn it _all,_ what was he doing? It wasn’t like John was going to forget he was there, after all.

There was a beat of silence and then Sherlock hissed, “Your sister. Harry is your sister!”

“Short for Harriet,” John said with a nod, happy to have stumbled onto a suitable distraction. “You were right about everything else, though.”

“There’s always something,” Sherlock grumbled, and then narrowed his eyes at John. “Are you all right? Your eyes are watering.”

“Yeah, no,” John said, wiping at said eyes and cursing the spotlight of a dead man next to him. “Just… dust, I think. Doesn’t look like this room has had anyone in it for a while.”

“Hmmm,” Sherlock said and continued to look at him for a few seconds before spinning toward the door. “If you’re done up here, do you think you could come downstairs? I’d like you to take a look at the mobile Rachel left us.”

John decided to ignore the _us_ comment in favor of getting Sherlock out of the room. “Yeah, fine. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Sherlock nodded once and then went out the door. John turned to glare- well, squint, really- at the other person in the room as Sherlock retreated. He was going to tell him that if he was trying to help John be subtle, he was doing a piss-poor job of it, when he noticed the ambiance surrounding the other man dimming, like a slider switch on mood lighting being turned down, in time with Sherlock’s footsteps down the stairs until just his original, subtle, vanilla-colored glow remained.

It reminded John of Mike Stamford, and how he hadn’t even noticed the man was dead until they’d entered the lab, and how Mike had looked damn near normal again when Sherlock had walked out. Which made him think of Jennifer Wilson, how she’d been dumb and sickly until Sherlock had charged in with the police, and suddenly she hadn’t shut up, pacing around the room with that obnoxious, sparking pink glow.

John’s mouth opened to say something that never came, and then he shut it and swallowed, looking toward the door. “Sherlock,” he said slowly, and turned to face the other man, who was watching him with a raised eyebrow and a slight, but encouraging smile. “He’s not- I mean. How-?”

“Ah,” he said in a self-satisfied way, as if John’s sudden moment of clarity had been his doing. “So you’ve noticed.”

“Yes,” John said, and then shook his head. “I mean, no. What did I just notice?”

“Sherlock,” the man said with a pride John didn’t understand, “is your soulmate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spiffocity wants you all to know how amazing she is, and said that I damn better put that in an author's note.
> 
> As I agree with her, I feel obliged to actually leave said note.


	9. Chapter Nine

John blinked twice and then barked out an angry laugh. _“What?_ No. Just- _no_.”

The vaguely disappointed look was back. “I have to say, when they told me that Sherlock was being paired with someone, I thought it was a grave mistake. You’ve no doubt noticed he’s not the easiest person to get along with, and to pair someone on a level that soulmates would share is foolish at best, and almost certainly detrimental to the other party’s mental health.”

“Your guidance skills- the part where you’re supposed build morale? They’re terrible,” John snapped.

The other man glared mildly back at him and said in a reprimanding tone, “As I was saying, Sherlock is most certainly not anyone’s ideal partner, but despite his brilliance and obvious skill, without his other half he’d have no way of utilizing it. You can imagine the nightmare of finding someone who cannot only put up with him, but develop the type of relationship needed to maintain the necessary balance between the two parties.”

John snorted sardonically. Yes, he could imagine.

“That is,” the umbrella man said, waiting until he had John’s full attention to continue, “until today. You are, without any doubt, Sherlock’s counterpart. You belong with each other, Doctor Watson.”

After a moment in which it became clear that this wasn’t an elaborately-worded joke, John ran a hand over his face with a groan. “This is ridiculous. I am not that man’s _soulmate._ What the hell is that even supposed to mean? That we _belong together_. You do realize how absolutely ridiculous that sounds?”

“It means,” the other man said in a tone of long-suffering patience, “that you are bound on a deeper level than most people can ever hope to achieve. Through a unique set of qualities, characters traits and certain instigating circumstances, you’ve developed into people who complement each other, but are individually incomplete- deficient, if you will- without the other. Without him- and trust me when I say I see the irony in the situation- you will go mad. Without you, Sherlock will continue to feel devastatingly abandoned and unaware of his capabilities. Anything that affects you, affects him, though I’m sure he’ll fight seeing it.”

“Yep,” John said slowly, as he tried to parse out the loaded speech. “Still not seeing it. I mean,” he continued, hands on his hips as he looked up at the other man incredulously, “are you mental? We can’t have a _bond_ , because I barely know him. I just met him, actually. And you expect me to believe he’s my- what? My missing piece? That we _complete each other?”_

John was vaguely aware of the fact that he was starting to sound more panicked than indignant, and decided to cut his losses with the conversation as he back toward the door. “Sorry, mate, but I think you’ve got the wrong man. I’m just here to share the rent.”

The man’s eyebrows were pulled down low in confused irritation, as if he weren’t quite sure what had gone wrong. “Doctor Watson-”

“John!” Sherlock bellowed from down the stairs.

“Yes, all right, I’m coming!” John shouted back, and then turned to say once more, “I’m sorry,” before retreating down the stairs and back to the sitting room. It was the truth, actually- he _was_ sorry, and confused as hell, because as he strode back into the room where Sherlock was pacing in front of the fireplace, flipping through the pink phone as he muttered to himself, John was hit with a sudden feeling of rightness. It wasn’t contentment, not exactly, but more a sense of purpose, that there was something worth striving for right in front of him. Which was obviously just a fluke, his subconscious conjuring things from the conversation he’d just run from. Because as much as he had a desire to see inside Sherlock’s head and watch the brilliant flashes and organized chaos of his mind, he wouldn’t wish anyone inside his own head for anything. And that was just it, wasn’t it? Sherlock was amazing- he was brilliant and beautiful, a force of nature, despite being rude as hell. How did a broken ex-soldier with no future end up with someone like that? Sherlock didn’t _need_ another half. John was the one who was defective- in comparison to Sherlock, at least, although he figured that most people were.

“Did your sister call back?” Sherlock asked suddenly from across the room, and John realized that Sherlock had been watching him stare.

“What? John said blankly, and then, “Oh, ah, yes.”

Sherlock smirked slightly at the obvious lie, but seemed willing to let it go at the moment.

John cleared his throat and crossed the room to look down at the phone’s screen. “Find anything?”

Sherlock hummed, and if there was any meaning behind the sound, it was lost on John. Sherlock flipped quickly through a few different screens on the phone, and then handed it John. “Do you recognize any of these names?”

Damn that _blasted_ man and his _fucking_ umbrella, John thought as Sherlock’s fingers brushed his and he suddenly felt hot. Sherlock, who didn’t seem capable of ignoring any of John’s reactions, was giving him an odd look, and John cleared his throat again before looking down at the contact list on the screen. He scrolled through them twice, before shaking his head and handing the phone back, careful not to touch Sherlock in the transfer. “Sorry, no.”

Sherlock shook his head, muttering, “It was a long shot, anyway,” and went back to pacing as he tapped at the screen.

John waited for a minute or so, but he didn’t seem needed at the moment, so he went into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove, rummaging through the cupboards until he found a half-empty box of tea. There were several containers and petri dishes that John instinctively recoiled from, and he hesitated longer than a doctor and combat veteran should have before opening the refrigerator to check for milk. No luck. So he was having it black, which was fine, because there was no way in hell he was chancing the white powder in the sugar bowl.

The kettle clicked off while John was thoroughly rinsing a couple of mugs. He poured the water over the tea bags, before walking into the sitting room to hand one to Sherlock. Sherlock pushed his hand out and blindly swiped for the mug while messing with the phone as he paced by, and John was forced to actually grab the man by the wrist and guide his hand to the mug. There was another strange surge of something disturbingly like possessiveness and belonging that passed over him, and John bit back a curse as he pulled his hand back. Sherlock stopped pacing to look down at the mug in his hands and then at his wrist with a mildly confused expression before he continued wearing a path across the flat.

Gloves, John thought as he sank down into the red armchair. He was just going to have to invest in a pair of really good gloves.

He watched Sherlock move back and forth for a few minutes before he asked, “What exactly are you looking for?”

“Anything even remotely interesting,” he said, letting out a frustrated growl before tossing the phone onto the armchair and ruffling a hand through his curls. “Pointless.” He turned toward John suddenly, and John cringed a bit as tea sloshed over the side of Sherlock’s mug, though Sherlock didn’t seem to notice. “You, why did she know you? How?”

“I’ve already told you,” John started in protest, but Sherlock waved him off.

“Yes, you’re clueless, we’ve established that,” he said dismissively, making another gesture with the hand holding the mug. He took a swig of it, made a face, and then set the mug down on the desk.

So he didn’t take it black then, John thought as he took a drink of his own tea, before nearly spitting it out.

Or maybe the tea had just gone off.

“Watson,” Sherlock muttered, but it wasn’t directed at John, really, nor was, “Why did she call you _Watson_? I need-” He picked up his phone and hit a few buttons, waiting impatiently until the person on the other end picked up. John blinked in surprise at the charming, flirtatious tone he adopted as Sherlock said, “Ah, Molly. Just who I wanted to speak to.”

John caught Sherlock’s eye and raised an eyebrow, mouthing _Molly?_

Sherlock just rolled his eyes and shook his head once, before cutting off the voice on the other end with, “There’s a body coming in this afternoon, young girl, reddish hair? Excellent! I’ll need to see it-” Sherlock listened for a moment, his expression becoming irritated, even as his tone was cajoling. “Come now, Molly, I’m not even asking for any of her organs. Just a look. Oh, and a blood sample. A copy of the pathology report also, by seven if you can manage. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

He rang off without any time for the person on the other end to answer, and stood staring out the window, hands fidgeting restlessly.

“So who’s Molly?” John finally asked, trying to sound only blandly interested, because he was. Blandly interested, that was, and not at all jealous of the way he’d been talking to whoever she was. Because that would be ridiculous, obviously.

“Pathologist at Bart’s morgue,” Sherlock answered absently. “Not important.”

John wasn’t sure if he meant the information was unimportant or if Molly was, but that seemed to be the only answer John was getting. Sherlock had that same unseeing stare that had so far lead to John being ignored, so he decided to hold his questions for later.

John stood up and snatched Sherlock’s mug off the desk before dumping both of them into the sink and grabbing his jacket. Sherlock glanced up from where he was standing at the desk, tapping at his keyboard with half-hearted enthusiasm and frowned. “Where are you going?”

“Tea,” he said as if it should be obvious. “And milk. You have actually seen the state of the refrigerator, haven’t you?”

“Tedious,” Sherlock said dismissively and then waved a hand at the door. “Go, then, but hurry up. We’re going to Bart’s soon.”

“Are we?” John asked sarcastically, but Sherlock must have missed his tone, because all he gave in response was a vaguely affirmative hum.

John wasn’t sure what it said about himself that he knew there was no point in arguing, since Sherlock was right.

 

John didn’t have enough in his account to fully stock the kitchen, and even if he had, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He’d never been much of a cook, but he could do beans on toast or whip up omelets in a pinch, so he stuck with what he knew. He also picked up far more boxes of tea than was probably necessary, but when it came to his morning cuppa, it was better to be safe than sorry. He wasn’t sure what Sherlock ate, if anything, but John figured that if he wanted anything special, he could damn well get it himself. After a quick stop at his place where he grabbed a few of the only important things he owned, he headed back to where he was quickly beginning to consider home. Or the-place-he-was-currently-residing-which-was-bigger-than-a-shoebox, at any rate.

When John finally hauled his bags into 221B, Mrs. Hudson was standing at the bottom of the stairs, wringing her slender hands. She looked round at him as he came in the door. The look of guilt-mixed-sympathy that she gave him did not bode well.

Somehow, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Is Sherlock okay?” and not one of the actual hundred other questions banging at his brain.

Mrs. Hudson’s lips pursed nervously, as if she was weighing how much to say, before she decided on, “Before you go up, I should probably explain-”

“No!” John heard Sherlock yell from up the stairs, not realizing it was being directed at them until he heard, “Mrs. Hudson, do not allow John up here!”

Which of course meant John went barreling up the stairs right that second.

What John found was not what he had been expecting to find. What he’d _expected_ to find was something like a small explosion, a fire perhaps. Possibly Sherlock tied to the ceiling without any way to get himself down. What he _actually_ found was half the police force swarming the sitting room and kitchen, Lestrade perched at the desk with his feet up on it like a conquering king overseeing the establishment of his new settlement.

“Sherlock,” John said, turning around slowly to take in the scene as the plastic bags he was still holding rustled. “What’s going on?”

“Drugs bust!” Lestrade said cheerfully. Sherlock growled, rolling his eyes as he turned to watch the officers like a hawk.

“Drugs-” John fairly sputtered, and then with some amount of venom, “You _are_ joking, right? _Him_ , on drugs?”

“John,” Sherlock said.

“I mean, have you met the man?” John continued.

“John,” Sherlock repeated a bit more desperately.

Which John ignored, because someone who valued his mind as much as Sherlock did wouldn’t mess with substances that could destroy it- the thought was ridiculous. Despite knowing him for a little less than twenty four hours, he was completely confident when he said, “I’m pretty sure you could search this flat all day and not find anything you could call _recreational._ ”

“John, I think you should probably shut up now,” Sherlock finally said firmly enough that it got John’s full attention. John turned to finally look at him, and the look on Sherlock’s face made John’s chest do something funny and uncomfortable.

“You?” John said in disappointed disbelief.

“Oh, shut up,” Sherlock hissed with defensive derision and then shouted at Lestrade, “I am clean! I don’t even smoke!”

The DI, who was no more than ten feet away, didn’t even flinch as he watched Sherlock yank up his sleeve to reveal a nicotine patch on his arm.

“Oh, hey, good for you,” he drawled in return, and pulled up his own sleeve to reveal a matching patch. “Me neither.”

Sherlock growled under his breath, yanking his sleeve back down without buttoning it up. “I won’t be bullied, Lestrade. I’ve told you everything I know-”

“What, like the fact that the girl who supposedly jumped off that building right in front of you was our murder victim’s daughter?” the DI said crossly. He stood and came the few steps around the desk that would bring him to stand in front of Sherlock and crossed his arms. “What else aren’t you telling us?”

“So you’re going to fabricate evidence against me unless I do your job for you, is that it?” Sherlock snarled, then turned and snapped when Sergeant Donovan came into the room holding a jar, “Put that back!”

“They’re eyeballs and they were in the microwave,” she said, as if trying to reason with someone who had put said eyeballs in the microwave would do any good.

“They’re for an experiment,” he said condescendingly. She rolled her eyes at the violent gesture he made toward the kitchen, but went tramping back in to replace them.

John took a few steps to peer into the kitchen, wondering if he could push his way to the fridge to at least put the milk away before it went bad. He settled for setting the bags on a spot on the worktop that the team seemed finished with.

“What about you, Doctor Watson?”

John turned to look at Lestrade, who was looking at him with considerably less suspicion than he’d shown Sherlock. “Sorry?”

“I don’t suppose you know how Rachel Wilson’s body ended up being thrown from the top of that building?”

John blinked and tried to make sense of the question. “Did- did you say her _body_ was thrown?”

“John,” Sherlock tried, but John ignored him in favor of freaking out just a little.

“No, hang on, are you saying she was dead before-?”

“John,” Sherlock said in a sharp warning, and John turned toward Sherlock, who stared at him as it trying to telepathically send him a message. John didn’t need to be psychic to get the _do shut up_ being sent his way.

John snapped his mouth shut and took a breath through his nose. Right, their story was that they hadn’t seen anything, wasn’t it?

“Rachel Wilson,” Lestrade supplied after a few moments of tense silence, “had been in a coma for a week before you found her- leukemia. Not dead really, not yet, but pretty damn close. The doctors didn’t have much hope, but her mother, Jennifer Wilson, whose corpse you saw earlier, was paying to have her kept at a private medical facility. Apparently, she was hoping that the doctors were wrong and that Rachel would eventually wake up.”

“Delusional,” Sherlock scoffed, and the room stilled just a bit, switching slightly horrified attention toward him. Sherlock for once in his life seemed to notice, and leaned toward John to ask in a low, uncertain voice, “Not good?”

“A bit, yeah,” John answered, and Sherlock grimaced before running a fidgety hand over his hair and pacing away. “There must have been a mistake then, because people without higher brain function typically don’t regain higher brain function and then jump off a roof.”

“That’s what we were thinking, yeah,” Lestrade said, giving John a searching look. Whatever he found there must have- at least at the moment- convinced him that John was telling the truth, because he sighed and ran a hand over the back of his head. “Look, are you sure it was Rachel you saw run up there? Maybe it was someone else and the body was, I don’t know, a decoy?”

“So the criminal just _happened_ to have a kidnapped comatose child on the roof of a building in case he needed to throw it to divert attention?” Sherlock sounded so offended by the stupidity of it, John had to cough to smother his laugh. Sherlock glared at him as he wasn’t taking the indignity of it all seriously enough. “No, it was Rachel Wilson on that roof. The question is, how did she get there?”

“Ran up, apparently,” John murmured absently. Something wasn’t right about this whole thing- aside from the obvious, that is. What John had seen and spoken to on the roof had not actually been a ten year old girl, of that he was now certain. Medically speaking, there had been no little girl in that body. So what _had_ been? John hadn’t ever given more than a passing thought to spirit possession, but he found it was the only explanation he could come up. Which really said a lot about how his life had turned out, didn’t it?

So then who- or what- had been (John grimaced just thinking it) _possessing_ Rachel? And how the hell had they known who John was?

More importantly, what the _fuck_ had they been insinuating when they told him to get things sorted with Sherlock?

“John?” Sherlock said in a low, questioning voice.

“Hmm?” John’s focus shifted back to the present and he blinked at Sherlock who was standing in front of him, rather closer than was probably necessary, and pretty much _looming_. John’s traitorous heart kicked in his chest and his breath caught.

“You know something.” Sherlock’s voice was sharply accusing, but low enough not to catch the ears of the DI as he watched John with narrowed eyes. “What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” John lied, made easier by the fact that it was half the truth. Sherlock made a scoffing noise, and John insisted, “Really, I don’t know anything.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes and declared, “I don’t believe you.”

_“Sherlock,”_ Lestrade said impatiently, raising his eyebrows expectantly when Sherlock turned to look at him. “Well?”

“I told you!” Sherlock bellowed, taking a threatening step forward, “I don’t have anything yet!”

“The suitcase,” Lestrade shouted back, pointing at the pink case sitting in the corner, waiting to be taking in as evidence, “would suggest otherwise!”

Right that second, with typically brilliant timing, the umbrella man popped up in John’s peripheral vision, and John flinched, biting back a half-formed curse. “John,” he said amiably. “Just a friendly suggestion, but I’d recommend getting Sherlock out of here before he does something… regrettable.”

If _regrettable_ meant that he was about to punch one of New Scotland Yard’s finest in the face, then John was inclined to agree.

“Okay,” John said probably louder than was necessary, grabbing Sherlock by the wrist to forcibly pull him toward the door. _Protect_ flooded John’s system at the contact, and it was harder than it should have been to let Sherlock go when he made an affronted noise and pulled away, but he managed it. Clothing, John had to remember to put clothing between them.

“John, what are you-?”

“We had an appointment, Sherlock, remember? At the morgue?” he prodded when Sherlock didn’t seem to catch it. He was staring at John with a dazed, slightly confused expression, but it quickly sharpened into something more present at the reminder.

“Yes, obviously,” he said, spinning to face the DI. “If you’re quite done here, I do have somewhere I need to be.”

Lestrade hesitated for a second before sighing heavily. “All right, everybody!” he called through the flat. “Pack it up- we’re done here!”

John handed Sherlock his ridiculous coat and slipped his more practical one on as the invading crew packed up and filed out, taking the pink case with them. As John watched it go, a thought occurred to him, and he turned to ask in a low voice, “Do you still have the-?”

“Yes,” Sherlock answered just as quietly, his movements jerky and angry as pulled on his scarf. They waited until the last of them were gone and then John followed Sherlock down the stairs to get a cab. He paused on the landing as the supercilious voice of their resident umbrella man called, “Oh, and John? Do keep an eye on him, won’t you?”

John huffed a laugh that he hoped conveyed the fact that he wasn’t making any promises.

 

John was a bit surprised to find that Molly, the morgue’s pathologist, was a pretty if somewhat mousy young woman with a small, hesitant voice. John watched in bemusement as Sherlock was charming and abrasive by turns and he wasn’t sure if Sherlock was trying to get something or just confuse everyone.

Whatever he was doing, it worked, because they ended up with Rachel Wilson’s pre-autopsied body on a slab in front of them while Sherlock did his thing, dancing around the body with his tiny magnifying glass and muttering to himself. John watched with a sort of morbid fascination, and definitely should not have found it as attractive as he did.

Which was a large part of the reason he started guiltily as Molly came up beside him and said in her small, hesitant voice, “Um, sorry, but… who were you again?”

“Uh, John. John Watson,” he said with a neutrally friendly smile and shook her hand. It shouldn’t have been such a problem to be nice to her, but the way she so obviously fell over herself when it came to Sherlock set his teeth on edge with jealousy. Which was ridiculous, obviously. Hadn’t John just decided not an hour ago that the whole Sherlock thing was a bad idea? Epically bad. The worst.

Though that didn’t stop him from not wanting anyone else to have him, apparently.

“So,” Molly said after a moment with loaded nonchalance. “Have you two… known each other long?”

“No, not really,” John answered distractedly, tilting his head in confusion as he watched Sherlock pull open the corpse’s mouth and peer inside. “Just about a day.”

“Oh,” she said faintly, and her cheeks went a little pink. “So is this like… are you out together then?”

John stared at her. “What, like right now? No, of course not.”

Jesus, her too? Was there a sign on John’s forehead or something?

She seemed to brighten a little bit at this. “Oh, well, you know. Sherlock doesn’t really- you know, with people, so I just figured…”

“Yeah, well,” he muttered. “You’re not the only one.”

“Molly,” Sherlock suddenly interjected, barreling toward her to snatch away her clipboard and rifle through it. He was apparently done with charming then, John thought and watched with growing concern as Sherlock’s movements became more agitated the more he flipped through the paperwork.

“Nothing!” he shouted suddenly, and Molly jumped with a small squeak as he flung the clipboard at the desk, where it hit the side and clattered to the floor. “She was practically dead! How was she up there speaking to us? To _you_?” he clarified, turning to pin John with a manic glare. He crossed the few paces between them and John reflexively dropped into a defensive position. “What could you possibly have to do with this? No, don’t say _nothing_ ,” he sneered unattractively when John opened his mouth to say… well, that, “because I know, but I also know that you’re not telling me everything. It’s not guilt, so what is it? Hmm?”

Feeling a bit cornered and threatened with Sherlock bearing down on him, John shouted back, “What do you want me to say? If you don’t know, how could I possibly-?”

Sherlock made a snarling noise, then spun on his heel and stalked out, banging the doors open and letting them slam behind him.

“What a fucking diva,” John hissed through clenched teeth, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He didn’t like lying to Sherlock- he really didn’t like lying at all- but god damn it, he was doing his best here and what exactly would he tell him anyway? All he had was a handful of theories around which the belief that John actually could speak to the dead was a bit essential, and God only knew he wasn’t ready to go down _that_ road yet with Sherlock.

John blinked as he realized he’d begun thinking about being outed to Sherlock in terms of _when_ and not _if._

He’d gotten his heart rate down to somewhere within the range of normal when Molly cleared her voice nervously. “Well,” she said brightly when he started to apologize. “He wouldn’t be Sherlock if he didn’t drive us a bit mad, would he?”

“Yeah, no, I guess not,” he muttered back, because what the hell did he really know about Sherlock except that he was a total lunatic? A brilliant, beautiful, slow-burning chemical fire of a lunatic that occasionally culminated in small explosions that John apparently had an unexplainable protective fondness for, and holy hell, he needed a cuppa.

“Listen,” he said, “it was really nice to meet you, but I think I’m gonna-”

John stopped talking as his text tone went off. He made an apologetic noise and fished his phone out of his pocket, frowning at the unfamiliar number on the screen. It was a picture message, and John was even more confused when it opened to reveal a grainy photo of Sherlock, sitting in the back seat of a cab, his face lit up by the screen of the pink mobile phone he was looking down at. The angle made it look like it had been taken from the front seat, but why the hell-?

It was the text that made John’s breath stutter to a halt in his chest: _You should keep better track of your things. I did tell you I had plans, didn’t I?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, yes, I know, two and a half weeks between updates! (If you were keeping track- if you weren't, then it was one week and I'm totally on schedule. Mostly.) You can blame nursing school and penchant for writing chapters, posting them, and then looking at my outline to find that I totally went down a side path that lead into the ocean- and then my plot, of course, drowned.
> 
> I resuscitated it, so we're good now. #nursingschoolftw
> 
> As always, many skittles and all the bunny slippers to my alpha-beta... thing... Spiffocity, who listens to me whinge and moan about how much I'm stuck, looks at bits of it when I ask her to, and then throws it back at me and says, "You're fine, just _finish_ it."
> 
> She's invariably right.
> 
> Thank you so much for being so patient with me while I work on this! It's my first work ever that I've put out for other people to read, and the response has been amazing!
> 
> 6/11/2014: Um... so edited for my ridiculous use of the word "cell phone" when I obviously meant "mobile." But hey, I caught it myself, so there's that, right?


	10. Chapter Ten

“Answer your phone, you utter _twat_ ,” John hissed as he jammed his finger against the send button on his own mobile for the third time. So far, it had done nothing but ring out. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t bother John, since Sherlock seemed the type to take great satisfaction in ignoring you if he were angry.  As it was, with the text sitting on his phone, John couldn’t stop himself from imagining a million different scenarios where Sherlock was slaughtered. His replying text of w _ho the fuck is this?_ had unsurprisingly gone ignored.

John groaned and slammed his phone down on the cab seat next to him as the call went again to voicemail. As soon as he’d regained function of his legs, he’d banged out of the morgue with as much force as Sherlock had (but far less drama), and grabbed a cab back to Baker Street. He had no guarantees that Sherlock had been headed there, and if he had actually been kidnapped, that was clearly not where he’d be taken. But John had no other options. It wasn’t as if going to the police was an option. Certainly, not with something as vaguely threatening as a mobile phone picture and mysterious message. It wasn’t as if John could even tell them who it was from.

There was also the fact that he just didn’t trust anyone else to take care of Sherlock. It felt like his job, like his duty, the same as taking care of his team had in Afghanistan. Only… decidedly less platonic.

The one thing he did have was a ghost with an umbrella who seemed to know an awful lot about this shit, and John was running short on choices. He hadn’t quite realized that he didn’t know the man’s name until he charged up the stairs at Baker Street, slammed into the sitting room, and shouted, “Hey… you. I hope I don’t have to summon you or anything, because I don’t know how to do that, and- listen, Sherlock’s missing. Well, he’s not missing, but I got this text -” He stopped to pull out his phone, pulling up the picture as he tried to reign in the babbling. He took a deep breath. “I think he might be in trouble.”

“It wouldn’t be a surprise, certainly.”

John turned quickly to find the man leaning casually back against the kitchen table and had never been happier to see a three-piece suit in his life. The man straightened when he saw the phone in John’s hand. “Is that it?”

John went to hand it over, stopping when he noticed the man’s arched eyebrow. “Oh, shit, right, sorry,” he muttered, then moved to stand next to him, holding it up for the man to look at. He scanned it quickly, instructing John to zoom in on certain parts of the photo (and then on how exactly to zoom in on a photo), before asking, “I assume you’ve tried calling him already. Have you tried tracking him?”

“Track-” John stammered, and then snapped, “He’s not a bloody dog!”

“His mobile, John,” the man said as if to someone very stupid. “I meant to ask if you had tried tracking the GPS on his mobile.”

“Not from the cab,” John muttered, and dropped into a chair at the desk before snapping open his laptop. “How does this work, exactly?”

Explaining that took considerably longer than zooming did, and a hell of a lot more patience on the umbrella man’s part, as John haltingly typed in commands. John swore when an error message flashed on the screen, running a hand over his face. Sherlock had, of course, turned off the tracking on his phone, the idiot. John was going to have a very intense discussion with him about taking safety precautions in his line of work.  It was going to involve at least a moderate amount of shouting.

“What do we do now?” John demanded, turning to look at the other man. His blue eyes were narrowed in focused concentration as he stared at the screen. It was eerily similar to the way Sherlock looked when he was trying to work something out, and the resemblance started a thought forming in John’s mind that he lost just as quickly when the man next to him spoke.

“That mobile phone that he has in the picture wouldn’t have anything to do with the atrociously colored suitcase that Sherlock was so obsessed with earlier, would it?”

“Well… yes, it belonged to a murder victim, Jennifer Wilson? Sherlock was working on the case with yard. It, um, actually…” John rubbed the back of his neck, feeling doubly ridiculous for feeling crazy telling this to a dead man. “Her comatose younger daughter gave it to me before she jumped off a roof.”

Both of the man’s auburn eyebrows rose toward his receding hairline as he asked in disbelief. “Did she?”

“Well, it wasn’t her, obviously,” John said, throwing up his arms in exasperation. “I think she was… I don’t know, possessed or something. She- it-  said it had plans for me.”

“Plans which apparently involve Sherlock,” the man said, tapping his bottom lip thoughtfully.

John nodded, happy to leave out the parts where the thing had called Sherlock his. The umbrella man had enough strange ideas about he and Sherlock already- there was no need to go reinforcing them.

“Luckily for us,” the man said, shifting slightly to focus on the laptop screen, “Sherlock has more than one phone at the moment. We’re going to try tracking the other one. Where is the case?”

“What case?” John asked blankly. A second later, he swore. “The police took it when they raided the flat earlier.”

The man next to him straightened up suddenly. “John, it’s very important that you call the station right now. Get the detective in charge of the investigation on the phone. I’ll tell you what to do from there.”

“Yes, right,” John said, fumbling out his phone before looking up the number for NSY. It rang twice before someone picked up and John said in something close to his Captain’s voice, “I need DI Lestrade. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

A tired voice on the other end said, “This is Detective Lestrade,” and then had no time to say anything else, because John immediately jumped in with, “Sherlock’s in trouble.”

There was a brief pause, then swearing. Lestrade sounded decidedly more alert when he asked, “John Watson, is it? What’s he done now? I only left an hour ago!”

“I know, but I think he’s with whoever killed Jennifer Wilson. He went running off by himself when we were at the morgue, and-” The man standing next to John cleared his throat loudly and gave him a look that said _if you’re quite finished?_ John winced apologetically, cutting off Lestrade’s questions with, “Look, I know it’s going to sound weird, but I need you to get the case, that pink one you took?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it here. We were just going through processing. But how’s that going to-?”

“Tell him to read the tag on the handle with her contact information,” the umbrella man cut in. “What’s the email address?”

John nodded. “Is there an email address in the contact information on the luggage tag?”

“Hang on,” Lestrade said in harrassed way, and there was the sound of shuffling. “Yeah, it’s- oh, Christ, of course it is- jenni dot pink at mephone dot org dot uk,” he read out, and John copied it down onto a post-it next to his laptop. He looked up to the man beside him who gave an affirmative nod.

“Yes, perfect, thank you. I’ll let you know if anything comes up.”

He rang off to the sound of Lestrade’s, “Oi, wait a minute!”

“Now what?” John demanded. He typed in the address that was recited to him, before adding the email on the post-it. He stopped when he got to the password box. “Shit, the password. I don’t-” John scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to think. The password for the phone had been Rachel’s birth year, but when he tried it on the computer, he got a failed login attempt screen. John swore, glancing at his watch. It had already been twenty minutes. How much longer did they have?

“I think,” the man next to him said, all casual efficiency as he gazed over John’s shoulder, “you may want to try something a bit more specific.”

“Such as?” John gritted. He didn’t have time for gentle nudging in the right direction. He needed to get to Sherlock before he did something stupid and got himself hurt- John refused to even contemplate to possibility of an or worse.

The man sighed as if sensing the desire to further his thinking was wasted on John, and said, “Her name, John- try the daughter’s name.”

John pecked Rachel’s name into the password box and hit enter. Immediately, a loading screen came up, and John was barely breathing as he waited for it to lock onto the phone’s location. After what seemed an eternity, it was still trying to locate the phone’s signal, and John couldn’t sit still any longer. He left it to work, moving into the kitchen to the things he’d brought back from his place earlier. digging through to the bottom of his duffel to where his Sig was sitting, wrapped in a jumper. He pulled it out along with the clip, checking to make sure it was loaded before sliding it home, and then tucked the gun down into the back waistband of his jeans, pulling his jumper down over it.

He heard a sudden ping from the laptop in the sitting room, and John ignored the look of concern the other man gave him as he came back into the room to look at the screen. He watched as the screen zoomed in on a street map where a dot was moving, presumably Sherlock in the cab (still? where the hell were they going?), and pulled on his jacket as he watched it, before snatching it up and heading for the stairs. The man with the umbrella moved with him, his voice careful as he said, “John, I believe I should warn you-”

“Can this wait?” John snapped, already headed out the door. He was somewhat surprised as the other man moved with him, following him out onto the pavement. He looked back at him as he waved his arm for a cab. “Listen-”

“Mycroft,” the other man offered, inclining his head, and it took John a second to realize that he’d been offering his name.

“Okay,” he said, trying and failing to imagine the kind of people who would name their child Mycroft. “If you’re going to tell me that taking a human life is going to besmirch my immortal soul or something, I’ve gotta tell you,” he reached for the handle to the door of the cab that pulled up beside him, balancing the open laptop on his other arm as he turned to look at Mycroft, “you’re a few years late, mate.”

John slid into the cab, balancing the laptop on his knees as he checked where Sherlock currently was.

“I was going to say,” Mycroft said from his sudden location across from John, and John jumped about a foot in the air, pushing three wrong numbers on his phone and nearly dropping the computer all at once, “that this thing, whoever it is, may not be able to be stopped by what you have down the back of your trousers. The body it inhabits, almost certainly, but if it is what I think it is, it’s going to take more than bullets to stop it.”

John opened his mouth to answer, before catching the curious gaze of the cab driver in the rearview mirror and shut his jaw in frustration. Mycroft rolled his eyes and sighed. “Your mobile, John- it really is indispensable in feigning conversations.”

John growled under his breath as he put his phone up to his ear and asked, “Are you actually going to tell me what I’m dealing with or are you going to make useless mysterious comments until we get there?”

“It would help you to appear less suspicious,” Mycroft said in an irritatingly unperturbed tone, “if you didn’t focus on me while you talked. I’m not here, remember? Now,” he continued as John swore under his breath and did as he suggested, looking down to the laptop, “I can’t be sure until I see it, but I think what you’re up against is an asmodai- a spirit that possesses others without their consent, usually for a purpose requiring a corporeal form, such as speaking to the living.”

“Or killing the living?” John asked his phone as he watched the screen in front of him and then raised his voice to quickly tell the cabbie, “Left here please!”

“Not by itself, no. Asmodai are lower level spirits and bound to certain inescapable laws. One of those is the inability to directly harm the living.”

“Directly harm?” John repeated. “So if they were to find a way to do it indirectly…?”

“The concept that is that as long as they are not actively causing harm to a person, they are free to do as they choose. Unfortunately, they tend to be nasty, vindictive creatures that enjoy finding ways around the laws that bind them.” Mycroft’s voice turned dark when said, “They can be quite creative.”

“You said they possess others without their consent,” John said, then barked, “Turn right here please and then two more blocks and a left!”

John could tell Mycroft was watching him, even as he stared down at the screen in his lap and asked, “If they can’t harm the living, then how exactly do they end up taking over someone’s body without their permission?”

“They wait until the person is no longer able to give consent,” Mycroft answered, sounding vaguely impressed that John seemed to be following the conversation. “It takes a great deal of planning, of being in precisely the right place at the right moment, but they are ageless and can be endlessly patient. The result is that when they do finally find a body, it’s very difficult to persuade them to give it up.”

“How difficult?” he asked, but at that moment, the laptop gave a loud beep and John looked down to find the moving dot that was Sherlock had stopped moving. As he gave to cabbie the address, ignoring the irritable muttering about _bloody crazies_ , he was torn between relief that he finally knew where to find his kidnapped flatmate and dread that the fact that they had stopped meant something worse was coming. Mycroft apparently had the same thought, because he moved to sit next to John, gazing down at the screen.

“Does that mean anything to you?” John asked, just barely remembering to say it into his phone, but Mycroft shook his head. “Right, okay then. You were about to tell me how exactly I’m supposed to deal with this thing when I can’t blow it’s head off?”

“You can, certainly,” Mycroft said, “but it’s inadvisable. The only way to truly get rid of an asmodai is to exorcise it. Harming the body it inhabits will only free it to find another host.”

“Exorcise- bloody hell! I’m not a fucking priest!” John hissed, pushing the heel of his unoccupied hand into his eye and rubbing at it. “I don’t even go to church on Christmas anymore!”

“John,” Mycroft said in a voice that was clearly meant to calm him down, “all it takes is focus. You’ve felt the resistance between your energy and the energy of the dead before, surely?”

“If you mean the migraines and the vomiting, then yes,” John answered, then added, “Or do you mean the bit where I get to experience their death when they touch me?”

“Only when they touch you?” Mycroft prodded.

John was starting to see where this was going, and he didn’t like it. “Well, no. But if they’re this evil-”

“More mischievous, I would say,” Mycroft interjected. Then added at John’s incredulous look, “Comparatively speaking.”

 _Compared to what?_ John thought. Mischievous wasn’t the word he’d use to describe anyone who made fun by convincing people to harm themselves, but didn’t feel he had the time to argue the point at the moment. “Right, well, the focusing thing is hell when it’s just a normal spirit. There’s no fucking way I’m trying it with something like-”

“If you don’t, there is a very real possibility it could come back for Sherlock again.” John risked a glance at Mycroft, who was watching him with an expression of complete seriousness. “Only the next time, it will be in another body and most definitely more prepared. They may begin the game to play, John, but they do not like to lose.”

John groaned under his breath and shut his eyes, leaning over to smack his forehead against the cab’s window. “So what do I do?” he finally asked grudgingly. “And don’t say focus on the- thing, because all that’s going to do is make me sick all over it. Unless that’s your plan right there?” John looked up, raising an eyebrow at the man next to him. Hopefully, it looked like he’d seen something dubious out the window, but the cabbie didn’t seem to be paying attention.

Mycroft sighed, twirling the tip of his umbrella against the dirty cab floor. “It appears I’ll have to instruct you as we go. It’s not the most desirable way to do it, I know, but it seems we have little choice. In actuality,” he continued, his voice taking on a darker edge, “you should have begun preparing for this months ago.”

There were a few dozen questions John could come up with in response to that statement, but the cab was slowing as it approached their destination. He dug a few notes out of his wallet, which thankfully had still been in the pocket of his jacket, snapped the laptop shut, and got out of the cab.

And it would just be his luck that Roland Kerr Further Education College would be made of two identical buildings, both closed for the night with lights on in random windows and absolutely no clues as to which one his flatmate had gone into. He made a low sound of frustration in his throat, vacillating between the two paths leading to the front doors. How the hell was he supposed to know which one he was supposed to choose? He wasn’t sure how much time they had, but it couldn’t be much, and choosing the wrong one could be the end of everything.

John was going to sit and have a good long think about how Sherlock had suddenly become _everything_ later, but for now he turned to Mycroft and said, “Any help you give me right now would be brilliant.”

Mycroft smiled blandly, and John couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to hit someone this badly. “You know what to do, John. Just follow your instincts.”

“Bollocks!” John barked. He stopped and took a deep breath through his nose. Arguing wasn’t going to move this along any faster, and Mycroft at least sounded like he knew what he was doing. “How do I do that, then?”

“Concentrate on Sherlock,” Mycroft said steadily, moving to stand in front of John with an air of support. “There should be something specific about him that stands out only to you. A color, an image. Sometimes it can be an impression or an emotion.”

“My God, could you be any more vague?” John demanded, but sighed and closed his eyes at the glare he got in response. Concentrate on Sherlock. What did stand out to him? His eyes, certainly, and the feeling of being stripped to his bones when they focussed on him, but he didn’t think that was specific to himself. He thought of flashes of red undertones in his soft, dark hair when he passed through weak sunlight by the window. He thought about manic pacing in the flat at Baker Street, the random bits of equipment and half-forgotten experiments. He thought about making horrible tea, of guiding it into one of Sherlock’s hands,  the skin cool and dry-

 _Home, mine, protect._ The feeling was like an invisible tie that was roped to his ribcage pulling taught and thrumming with newly awakened energy that sparked silver-blue and gold in his peripheral vision when he opened his eyes. John didn’t remember the last time he’d had such a visceral, all-consuming response to someone, if he ever had, and definitely never quite like this. It terrified him, yet at same time that it made him feel less fractured. Or maybe that was why it scared him. How could one person have so much influence over how he felt about _himself_?

“John,” Mycroft said and the tie slipped, running through his mental grasp like a silk rope, until he frantically latched onto it again. He was panicked just a little, because just holding the thread while he was standing still was taking all of his concentration. He wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to follow it without losing it.

“John,” Mycroft tried again, a bit more softly this time, and John just managed to turn his head slightly to indicate he could hear him. “Can you tell where he is?”

“I don’t-” John started, and then stopped before saying hesitantly, “The right? It’s… I don’t know, I can’t get anything more clear than that.”

“Then that’s where we’ll start,” Mycroft said.

He’d barely finished the sentence before John was striding toward the door, pulling the Sig out of his waistband as he shouldered his way inside. He’d fully expected for the tightness in his chest and the sparks at the corners of his vision to dissipate as soon as he wasn’t actively paying attention to them. But as the panicky feeling of the tie slipping away from him faded, he was surprised to find that he could still sense the bright pinpricks of light and the previously strangling hold on his lungs turned into a kind of pulling current. He stepped first toward one hall, and then drifted toward the other, testing the flow it. To the right, it pulled at his legs, drawing him farther down the dimly lit hall and toward a stairwell.

His boots weren’t quite silent on the wooden floors, but close enough that anyone not listening for his approach wouldn’t hear them.  The door to the stairwell was less quiet, but John paused before going through, his gun pointed at the ceiling as he waited and listened. John hadn’t noticed that Mycroft wasn’t following him, or thought about him at all actually, until he appeared next to John to tell him, “It’s clear- you can move forward.”

John did so immediately, asking over his shoulder in a low murmur, “If you can just- you know, pop around like that, why can’t you go find Sherlock and take me to him?”

“There are at least a hundred rooms in this building. Following your connection directly to him is exponentially faster than doing a blind sweep of the entire building,” Mycroft answered.

John was about to suggest he do the blind sweep anyway, in case he was doing this whole connection thing wrong, when they reached the landing for the second floor. The pull at John became stronger, almost throbbing through the door. There was urgency in the way it was suddenly dragging at him, and he’d reached out, ready to slam through and race down the hall, until a phantom umbrella suddenly swung up in front of him, blocking his way to the push bar on the door.

John turned to demand Mycroft move the bloody thing, when the man said firmly, “Wait,” and then he was gone. John swore softly, reaching out for the push bar and pulling back, before running a hand over his hair in indecision. They didn’t have time for this. He could feel it in the thrumming current and the barely-there strobe of the sparks leading him to where he needed to be. Something was wrong, or getting there, and the longer he spent here dithering, the more time Sherlock had to do something really stupid-

“The hall is clear,” he heard suddenly from beside him, followed by, “but, John-”

John didn’t hear the rest as he pushed through the door, gun up and at the ready. There was  no hesitation now, not with the draw almost pulling his feet out from under him, and he moved on instinct toward the third door down the hall on the left. There were two rooms with lights on in this area, but he would have known which was the right one even without the connection to Sherlock, because as he approached that room, he could hear the low hum of voices.

They were wrong, though. He stopped just outside the door, back flat against the wall as he hugged the door frame to listen.

The first thing he noticed was that neither voice was Sherlock’s. There was a nasally tenor with a cockney accent speaking in low, somehow hypnotic tones despite the grating sound of it, and John was sure that was what Sherlock was hearing. The part Sherlock wasn’t hearing was what had the hair on the back of John’s neck prickling as he drew himself up straighter in alarm. He recognized the dark, sibilant tones. The last time he’d hear them, he’d watched the body of a ten year old girl drop off a roof.

It sounded like the voice was facing away from him and into the room. John hadn’t heard a word from Sherlock yet, and that was worrying in itself, because if Sherlock were conscious, he would be speaking, if only to tell the other person in the room to shut up. If Sherlock weren’t conscious, he’d have to move quickly, though it might make things easier for him to do what he was going to have to do if he weren’t. Confident that the only people in the room were Sherlock and that thing, John raised his gun and moved around the corner.

Sherlock’s eyes immediately flicked from the pill he was holding at his lips to the doorway, and John felt a small flicker of satisfaction in the way his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. John had his gun raised and leveled at the back of the man facing Sherlock by the time he said, “Don’t move a muscle, or I will kill you.”

There was a beat of silence and then it said in an intrigued tone, “Dr. Watson,” the hiss of his last name slithering into his ear until he had fight the urge to rub at it. It sounded less intrigued and more annoyed when it asked, “How’d you find us, then?”

“John,” Sherlock said, but John hushed him with, “Not now, Sherlock. And put the bloody pill down, would you?”

Sherlock looked down to the capsule he still held in front of his face as if he’d forgotten about it, and moved to slip it into his pocket. Clearing his throat, he drew himself up straighter in an attempt to appear unfazed.

“I assume the cops ain’t far behind ya?” the man asked as if it hardly mattered.

John hesitated a fraction of a second too long before answering, “Of course,” and scowled at Sherlock when he groaned, “You _idiot_.”

“Well, forgive me, but I was bit preoccupied with following your arse halfway across London, and hey-” he said, dropping into a stable shooting position as the man in front of him turned, “I said don’t move!”

It was grinning like a maniac as it watched him with dead blue-grey eyes. John’s vision swam as they flickered in and out of that same muddy red-brown he’d seen on Rachel Wilson. “You’re not gonna shoot me, Dr. Watson.”

“No?” John asked on a harsh breath, and pulled back the hammer.

“Course not,” it said with complete confidence, and even went so far as to tuck the man’s hands into his well-worn pockets. “Because you know what happens if you do.” He smiled blandly, tipping his head toward Sherlock with a meaningful glance.

It was about then that John realized he hadn’t seen Mycroft since he’d bolted from the stairwell. Where was that damn man and his umbrella? Wasn’t he supposed to be here showing John what to do?

“John,” he heard suddenly beside him, and John just barely bit back _speak of the devil_. Mycroft was next to him, somehow suddenly towering and imposing when previously he’d just been pretentiously tall. “We need to do this quickly.”

No shit, John wanted to say, but the thing in front of him suddenly narrowed its eyes at Mycroft and hissed out, “Who’s this, then? Have you been making friends, Watson?”

Sherlock’s head jerked up from where he’d been messing with his mobile, and his eyebrows lowered suspiciously when all he saw was John.

“You need to get rid of Sherlock, and for God’s sake, John, _quickly_ ,” Mycroft urged.

John hesitated with his finger over the trigger, before telling Sherlock, “Go outside and call Lestrade.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and made a noise that said exactly how insufferable he thought John was being. “I already texted him and he’s on his way.”

“Good, then wait for him outside!” John said with increasing desperation, and wanted to shout at Sherlock’s answering scoff of, “And leave you alone here with him?”

“Just-” John gritted. He growled when nothing else immediately came to mind, adjusting his grip on the Sig. It felt as if an hourglass was emptying beneath his boots.

“We don’t have time for this,” Mycroft snapped. “Just do it, and we’ll deal with Sherlock later.”

“Go on, then, John,” the man in front of him crowed loudly, flinging out his arms. “Show the man what you can do!”

Sherlock was watching both of them with undisguised curiosity and fair amount of suspicion, twitching his hands at his sides and swaying forward as if he wanted to grab someone and demand answers. Mycroft moved more closely to John’s side and he watched as the spirit narrowed its eyes in sudden understanding. A dark, warning growl, guttural and utterly animalistic suddenly began low in the man’s throat, as he dropped his position to something more aggressive.

“You’re not gonna try that,” it said in a low, threatening snarl. “You ain’t got the power for it. I’ll _eat_ you, acolyte.”

“John,” Sherlock said in sudden alarm and took a step forward, stopping when the the man in front of John swung his head around toward him and snapped his teeth. Actually snapped his teeth like a goddamn rabid dog.

“Sherlock, just stay there,” John demanded, and Sherlock fell back half a step, arms raised in false defenselessness.  

“Now, John, do it now,” Mycroft barked, and John jerked, ready to follow a command he had no instructions for.

“Do what?” he asked, forgetting in his desperation that Sherlock was listening. The thing in front of him turned it’s attention back toward him at the sound of his voice. It made a desperate swipe for him, and John fell back a step, holding the gun steady as it advanced. Two more steps, then three, and John’s back hit the wall as Mycroft’s increasingly furious instructions fell on uncomprehending ears. There was less than a foot between them now, and John flinched hard when the thing made a sudden movement. It hadn’t gone after John, though. It was staring out the window, head cocked as it listened to something that John couldn’t hear.

And then he did. Sirens.

There was a beat of stillness, cold and strained. And then the man in front of him exploded into action, eyes wild and desperate as he turned and lunged toward Sherlock. Sherlock took two surprised steps back before stumbling over a metal chair, crashing to the ground with a shout as the possessed cabbie advanced on him.

Mycroft made some noise of alarm before beginning to yell, probably more instructions, but all John saw was thick hands inches from wrapping around a long, pale throat.

“Bugger it _all_ ,” John snarled, and fired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no excuses this time. I had two weeks off and all I could do was stare blearily at my screen and drool. "How do you words?" 
> 
> Also, I got sucked into the Dr. Frederick Chilton/Will Graham fandom, and I spent a good week there. Much to the spiffocity's amusement/dismay. I'm not making her beta anything that comes out of that one, for the preservation of the limited sanity she has left. Although she really is damn good at it!
> 
> Alpha-betaing, I mean. Not sanity.
> 
> Thank you everyone for being so patient, and for all the really supportive comments! I've never put anything out for people to read before, so I was kind of nervous, but this has been an awesome experience so far!


	11. Chapter Eleven

John watched a slow splash of crimson on the back of the man’s dove gray cardigan spread in grotesque slow-motion as the cabbie suddenly stiffened, arms locked and trembling for a long, silent second- before it all went to hell. The thing reared up over Sherlock with a shriek, it’s back twisting and straining as it’s hands scrabbled at the cabbie’s back, turning copper with blood as it tried to get at the bullet. Despite the kill shot, it was taking too long- there was too much time for it get a hold of itself and make a desperate slash at Sherlock, take him with it. John stepped forward, gun raised again to take off it’s head this time, when it turned to him with wild, nearly colorless eyes and snarled. It opened it’s mouth with an entirely inhuman sound, and John’s finger tightened on the trigger. He stared in horror as the thing started to shake, the red-brown haze coalescing and becoming more opaque, more real as it rose above the convulsing body of the cabbie, hovering in the air above all of them.

It was just a thick, undulating fog, but John could have sworn in that moment it wanted to kill him.

Suddenly, there was an explosive rush of wind as it dissipated to all corners of the room and was gone. The cabbie swayed for a moment, slack-jawed and dead-eyed, before gravity finally got it’s shit together and took him down. Sherlock let out a grunting huff of air as the man’s not-inconsiderable weight collapsed on top of him. There was a moment where no one moved, and then Sherlock made a breathless noise of agitation, reaching around the man’s back to grab his shirt before heaving his weight to the side.

They rolled until Sherlock was free of most of the crushing weight, at which point Sherlock wriggled his way out from under him, kicking and jabbing with his elbows probably more than was necessary. John watched with the sound of blood pounding in his ears, gun still trained on the thing on the floor. It wasn’t until Sherlock had straightened his coat and was shaking out his hair that he could breathe again. He lowered the gun slowly, his chest aching and mind racing with what could have happened, what could have been taken from him, and he didn’t even _have_ it yet, not really-

His body was apparently forgetting to consult his brain at the moment, because he had crossed the room and grabbed Sherlock’s face between his hands before it registered. “Are you all right?”

Sherlock’s look of indignation turned to one of surprise. His eyebrows lowered, but he didn’t pull away from John’s hold on him. “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

John tilted Sherlock’s head toward the overhead light to watch his pupils contract and then expand again when he tilted it down, then slid a hand down to rest on Sherlock’s shoulder, feeling the easy rise and fall of unlabored breathing. The other hand went to his neck, two fingers placed over the pulsing artery, but other than being just more than slightly elevated, he seemed fine.

Which made John feel better about what he did next, which was shove Sherlock hard in the chest and growl, “What the _hell_ is wrong with you?”

Sherlock stumbled a bit, throwing a hand out to catch himself on the table to his right. Stabilized, he glared at John from under dark, mussed fringe and said, “I told you, I am _fine_. I had everything under control.”

John stared at him for a second in disbelief, before smiling without any mirth. “No,” he said flatly. “No, that was not _under control_. You were going to take that damn pill!”

Sherlock’s face twisted into something bordering ugly, a scathing reply no doubt line up on his tongue, when John was distracted by Mycroft calling his name. Sherlock stilled, his wide eyes trained on something behind John, and for about a heartbeat, John thought he’d heard it. And then Sherlock was grabbing him by the shoulders, and spinning him around.

“Sherlock, what the hell-?” John started to bark, and then stopped when he heard it. “Shit!”

“Yes, John, that would be the police,” Sherlock said mockingly as he grabbed John’s shoulders and started forcibly walking him toward the door. The sound of sirens was much louder now, and definitely headed toward them. “And unless you want to spend the night explaining why you’ve been found with yet another corpse, this time bearing a bullet from _your_ gun, I suggest you make yourself scarce.” He stopped John at the doorway, took the gun from him, and slipped it into one of the voluminous pockets of his own coat. “It’s not likely they’ll prosecute- he was a murderer, and you were defending...” he seemed to hesitate for a second, “someone, but it would be best to avoid the courtcase. And the suspicion, of course. You’d be useless to me on the wrong side of the police tape.”

Bizarrely, that sounded like a compliment somehow, but John was more focused on the fact that Sherlock was still planning on being within five feet of him after this. What was _wrong_ with the man?

John opened his mouth to say there was no way in hell he was leaving Sherlock alone with that thing, dead or not, but stopped when Sherlock again grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around before shoving him in the back. “I told you, I’m _fine_. Go now, out the back. And for God’s sake,” he hissed down the hall when John began reluctantly toward the back stairwell, “don’t get caught!  I have questions that you’re going to answer and the delay would be intolerable.”

John cringed thinking about that conversation, but nodded and continued toward the exit.

 

John waited on the other side of the police tape- the _wrong_ side, apparently- watching Lestrade interviewing Sherlock, who was sitting on the back of an ambulance for the second time that day. He’d gotten a text on his mobile from the DI fifteen minutes after escaping the building with Sherlock’s location, but John had waited in a cafe for ten minutes two miles down the road before showing up, just to be safe. He’d arrived just in time to see a paramedic pick up an orange blanket that was crumpled behind Sherlock’s back and put it back onto his shoulder with a sympathetic pat on his back. John hid a grin behind his hand at the look of confusion on Sherlock’s face, like the medic was demented or something, before quickly shrugging it off.

“You’ve made quite a mess of this one, haven’t you?” a cool voice said from beside him suddenly, but John thought he must have been half expecting it since he wasn’t startled. Only annoyed that the man was out here talking to him when he knew John couldn’t answer with more than a nonchalant shrug. He’d kept Sherlock from being strangled, so he really had nothing to regret.

There was a heavy, disapproving sigh from beside him. “We’ll need to plan for his next attack. Because there will be one. He’s not finished, Dr. Watson.”

John’s jaw ached with tension. The body of the cabbie was laying dead and tagged in a body bag on it’s way to a morgue somewhere, and that should have been the end of it. When John killed someone, they were supposed to stay dead, and John found himself extremely aggravated by the fact that someone was getting away with breaking that rule.

“Well,” Mycroft said in a decidedly lighter tone. “If you’ll gather Sherlock and bring him back to Baker Street, we can begin preparing for the backlash. Not his,” he added and John chanced a look to see if the tone of smug amusement was showing on his face. It was. “That I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with on your own. Although I do suggest getting him back to the flat before beginning to answer any questions. We wouldn’t want him to get sidetracked and drag you off for experimentation too soon.”

John’s look of alarm must have been amusing because he let out a short laugh before disappearing from sight. John swore under his breath and stuffed his hands into his jacket. Mycroft was joking, of course. He had to be. Wasn’t he? John eyed Sherlock with apprehension, but the man was ignoring him for the time being, it seemed.

He had no intention of telling Sherlock the truth, at least not the whole truth, and so far his claim of ignorance had worked. Mostly because it was genuine- John really had very little clue as to what they were dealing with. It was just that he couldn’t fool himself into thinking that Sherlock wouldn’t eventually start asking the right questions, and what would he say then?

The same thing, he decided, giving himself a decisive nod. Claim ignorance. If Sherlock wanted to get stroppy or angry about it, then let him. It was John’s secret to keep and none of Sherlock’s damn business.

John sighed heavily. God, he couldn’t even lie to _himself_.

The interview didn’t take long, and John had a vague idea why as he listened. He was too far away to hear the actual words being spoken, but Sherlock’s tone was sharply impatient in contrast to Lestrade’s exasperated one. He looked more resigned than outraged, though. It wouldn’t be the first time that day Sherlock withheld information from the police that day, and John wasn’t naive enough to think it wasn’t a regular occurrence. They seemed to come to some sort of agreement as Sherlock stood and gave a short nod before crossing to where John stood behind the tape.

John straightened automatically when he approached, though he consciously kept his face neutrally curious and not at all looking guilty. Sherlock stopped in front of him, cocked an eyebrow, and asked, “How do you feel about Chinese?”

John blinked. The question was so far out of the realm of what he’d been prepared for that the only thing he could get out was an intelligent, “What?”

“I know a place,” Sherlock continued. John was stupidly flattered Sherlock seemed to have enough faith in his mental capabilities that he thought John would catch up to the conversation on his own. “You can tell a good Chinese restaurant by the bottom third of the door handle. And,” he continued with a mock serious look, “I can predict the fortune cookies.”

“No you can’t,” John said on a bark of laughter. Sherlock raised an eyebrow at him as if to say _you doubt me_?

John grinned at him, a ridiculous feeling of fondness growing in his chest that he very adamantly tried to ignore. It didn’t stop him from swaying forward a step, though, and grabbing Sherlock by the wrist to feel the rushing thrum of his heartbeat. He just needed to touch, make sure he was standing solid and alive in front of him and not lying dead on the floor in that room, poisoned or strangled. It was illogical and paranoid, but with Sherlock here, touchable, and looking at him with a little crease between his eyebrows as he scanned John’s face, he finally felt the knee-weakening sense of relief that had been eluding him up until this point.

It was quickly joined by anger, and John’s gripped tightened reflexively at his wrist before he accused, “You were going to take that damn pill, weren’t you?”

Sherlock’s gaze snapped up from where it was locked onto John’s grip and he watched as the face smoothed into something wholly identifiable as far too serene to be true. “Of course not. I was just biding my time. Knew you’d show up eventually.”

“No, you didn’t,” John insisted, and had to stop himself from resisting when Sherlock pulled away from him. “That’s how you get your kicks, isn’t it? Risking your life to prove you’re clever.”

“Why would I do that?” Sherlock asked with such feigned innocence that John didn’t know whether to laugh or kick him.

John may have sounded more enamored than stern when he replied, “Because you’re an idiot.”

Sherlock’s lips gave a surprised twitch, like he was trying not to grin as he folded his hands behind his back and turned toward the street. “Dinner, Doctor Watson?”

John nodded, letting his fingers casually brush against Sherlock’s sleeve. “Starved.” He hesitated a beat, and Sherlock turned to give him a questioning look. “But let’s take it back to the flat, yeah?”

Sherlock cocked his head and said, “I suppose. Any particular reason?”

_A ghost with an umbrella suggested it would keep you from splitting my skull open to look inside._

John shrugged. “First night in. It’s a good way to break in the new place, don’t you think?”

Sherlock’s eyebrows drew together as if he was trying to decipher John’s thinking. “If you say so.”

“Well, I do,” John insisted, and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets to remind himself to keep them to himself. He nodded down the street when Sherlock continued to stare at him. “Shall we?”

 

 

Half an hour later, John and Sherlock had five cartons of Chinese food and a small bag of fortune cookies that the heavily-accented owner had insisted they take free of charge- something about an employee who had been selling drugs out of the basement, John hadn’t caught it all- sitting on one of the cleaner kitchen counters while John shuffled things around in the living room. Sherlock had immediately pulled off his coat, and grabbed the pill out of the pocket before disappearing into the bathroom. He came out again with a label-less pill bottle, and John stopped his shuffling to look at the man incredulously.

“No, Sherlock,” he said sternly and walked toward him, holding out his hand. “Absolutely not.”

Sherlock held the pill bottle back out of John’s reach, frowning as he asked with poorly constructed innocence, “What?”

“You’re not keeping that in a pill bottle where someone might pull it out and swallow it.” He moved back into the living room as Sherlock stared at the bottle and shook it a little. “Put it in something else. And it’s not staying in the medicine cabinet. Why do you even have it? You know what it is. You saw the blood work on the corpses.”

Sherlock came up beside him to drop a couple of cartons onto the newly cleared coffee table before straightening and giving John an inscrutable look. “I prefer to come to my own conclusions.”

John stared back, and then cleared his throat. “Well. Try not to poison yourself while you’re at it, okay?”

“Yes, doctor,” Sherlock intoned with mock seriousness. Then he whirled around, snatching one of the boxes off the table and collapsing into his leather chair in a single graceful move that made something hot throb down to John’s toes. He smirked up at John as he pulled the box open, like he knew exactly what he was doing to John’s poor brain. Which was confuse the fuck out of it, because what exactly was he doing? Trying to soften him up a bit before pouncing on him with the big guns?

John was just picking up the shrimp fried rice when Sherlock suddenly said, “You work for Mycroft, don’t you?”

He fumbled the box, swearing and sputtering and basically giving the whole game away as Sherlock watched him impassively. When he finally had the carton set back down, he’d pulled himself together enough to growl, “What are you on about?” but it was a lost cause at that point.

“Oh, God, you do,” Sherlock said with such aggrieved disappointment that John immediately felt guilty, despite the fact that it wasn’t true. “I knew you’d never have worked out the mobile tracker on your own. How much is he paying you?”

“He’s not, because I don’t work for him,” John said firmly, grabbing one of the flimsy plastic forks with enough force to crack it before heading back toward the sitting room. How exactly would one even go about working for a dead man?

Which- wait.

John stopped walking halfway to his chair and stared at Sherlock, who had stretched out on the couch and was currently staring at the ceiling, looking like the universe was created just to annoy him.

“How do _you_ know about Mycroft?” John asked warily.

There was a pause, and then Sherlock’s eyebrows drew together. “What?”

John moved to sit on the edge of his chair, rattled box of shrimp rice clutched in one hand as he tried to figure out how exactly to word his next question. When that failed, he settled on repeating himself. “How do you know Mycroft?”

Sherlock turned to look at him then, running his eyes over John, probably going through his human polygraph routine. John must have passed at some point, because Sherlock blinked blankly and said, “You don’t work for him.”

“Nope,” John said with a tight smile.

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “But you have met him.”

John looked down at his carton and poked at the rice with his weakening fork. “Once or twice.”

There was silence for a moment as Sherlock seemed to digest that. “You mean to tell me that despite the fact that you’ve met my overbearing, manipulatively overprotective brother, you have nothing to do with his top-secret government rubbish, and ended up with me for a flatmate purely by chance?”

John stared, a forkful of rice halfway to his mouth and threatening to fall into his lap. Because what the hell was that sentence? Where was he supposed to even start?

No, hang on, he knew that one.

“Your brother?” John finally got out. “Mycroft was your- Christ.” He gave up on the rice, setting it down and rubbing his face.

“Was, why did you say _was_?” Sherlock demanded suddenly and there was the sound of fabric shifting as he swung upright on the couch. “As much as I’d love to disown him, currently he is still my parent’s other child, which presently makes him my brother. So why did you say _was_?”

This type of awkward conversation was a completely different animal than the one John had been expecting, and he found himself at a loss. How exactly did you go about telling someone that you knew their family member was dead because you’d seen their spirit?

Also, what the actual fuck? Why had Mycroft never mentioned that Sherlock was his brother?

“Sherlock,” John said carefully, and rubbed the back of his neck in hesitation. “When was the last time you actually spoke to your brother?”

Sherlock opened his mouth to answer, but was interrupted by the buzz of the doorbell. His jaw clicked shut as he turned to glare daggers at the door. “Give me two minutes and the answer to your question will be _two minutes ago_ ,” Sherlock said on a growl as he pushed up off the couch and stalked toward the stairs.

John turned to look over the back of his chair, staring after him in confusion. He heard Sherlock hit the bottom floor and then stomp toward the door and the clearer sound of traffic when he opened it.

And then the distinctively obsequious voice of Mycroft said, “Hello, brother mine.”

What had John bolting out of his chair and toward the door, though, was that Sherlock actually replied to someone who, up until this point, John had thought only he could see. Who was supposed to be dead.

“Piss _off_ , Mycroft,” John heard Sherlock snarl as he pounded down the stairs. Mycroft made some answer that John didn’t hear as he moved toward the door, where he stopped behind Sherlock and stared.

Mycroft’s gaze turned toward him and he gave a polite smile, tipping his head in greeting. Sherlock’s shoulders were rigid, his entire posture screaming with tension as he held onto the door and refused to move to allow his brother entrance. John was torn between physically moving Sherlock to get at Mycroft himself or telling him to just slam the door.

“Dr. Watson,” Mycroft said and John watched Sherlock’s arm jerk, like he really was going to slam the door. “I’d like to have a word with the both of you, if you don’t mind?”

John glared back at him, but reached out to put hand on Sherlock’s arm and pull it down away from the door. “I guess you’d better come up, then.”

Sherlock looked down at him as if John had stabbed him in the back, and then gave a great huff of inconvenience before turning to stomp up the stairs. John watched him go before he turned to Mycroft, who was shutting the door behind him, and growled, “What the fuck?”

“Language, John, really,” Mycroft tutted as he sauntered past him and started up the staircase. John could have throttled him, but he wanted answers more, so he followed Mycroft into the sitting room while keeping his hands firmly at his sides and far away from the other man’s neck. Sherlock was standing at the window with his hands in his trouser pockets, practically radiating contempt as he stared moodily outside.

John rolled his eyes at him, and then asked Mycroft, “Tea?” Though it came out a bit too aggressively to be polite.

“Don’t bother. He’s not staying,” Sherlock said quickly. He moved from the window to collapse into his chair, picking up a violin case as he went.

John raised his eyebrows at Mycroft, who just rolled his eyes in return, and then moved to sit across from Sherlock in the other chair. John sighed and went to turn on the kettle.

The sitting room was eerily quiet as he went about making three mugs of tea. When they were done and he headed back in with them, he found the both of them staring at each other, and John felt somehow like he’d missed an entire conversation as he handed out the cups. Mycroft broke Sherlock’s gaze long enough to smile blandly at John and nod his thanks. Sherlock completely ignored John and the tea, preferring instead to brandish a bow, though the violin stayed in his lap. He looked toward John briefly before sighing and letting his head drop back against the back of the chair. “God, do you have to ruin _everything_?”

John blinked. “What?”

“Not _you_ ,” Sherlock spat, head snapping up so he could glare at John. Which was paradoxical, really, since he apparently _wasn’t_ the problem. “I should have seen this coming, really I should have. Army doctor with a psychosomatic limp.” Sherlock sighed mournfully. “It was too good to be true.”

“Hang on,” John bristled. “I am an army doctor, thank you. I haven’t lied to you about anything.”

“Only by omission,” Sherlock laughed mirthlessly. “Or do you still expect me to believe you and Mycroft had nothing to do with each other before we met?”

“We didn’t,” Mycroft interrupted in a firm, level tone. “Dr. Watson and I had no connection to each other until he moved in here. It wasn’t until then that I discovered his unique skill set. You can imagine why I’d contact him so quickly, though.”

John visibly flinched, turning to stare at Mycroft in alarm. What the hell was he doing?

Sherlock was staring at Mycroft warily as if waiting to be told he was the unwitting participant of a practical joke. “What are you saying?”

Mycroft blinked. “John, of course. He did tell you that he can speak to the dead?”

Sherlock was still for a moment, as if running through everything that had happened since he’d met John and fitting things together. He turned to John suddenly, a soft noise of shock noise sticking in the back of his throat as he stared at him with wide, fascinated eyes.  Rationality seemed to be trying to make a comeback, and Sherlock’s voice was as close to pleading as John had ever heard it when he said, “Tell my brother that he’s lost his mind.”

But John wasn’t any better at lying than he’d been when this had all started, so the best he could do was look at Mycroft with intent to kill and say, “You bastard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I suck. Four weeks is unacceptable. But guys, I'm doing a clinical rotation at the largest psychiatric hospital in the northwest United States, and at the end of the day, it's about as much insanity as I can handle. 
> 
> I freaking love every minute of it. 
> 
> Not so much the (insurmountable amounts of) homework.
> 
> Lots of kit kats, chimichangas, and love from Carlos to my alpha-beta spiffocity! You can actually tell when exactly she started working on this with me, because that's when everything started making sense.
> 
> Also, ALSO, thank you so much you guys for being so patient! I really appreciate it! Four more weeks of nursing school, and then I'm free for awhile to do nothing but write and sleep! Whoo!!


	12. Chapter Twelve

John took two steps toward Mycroft and crossed his arms over his chest, looking just about as threatening as it was possible for someone John’s size to look. Which was quite a lot, if the way Mycroft almost imperceptibly leaned back into his chair was any indication. “Is everything all right, Dr. Watson?”

John looked pointedly toward the door. “You have two minutes to be out.”

One of Mycroft’s eyebrows raised. “Really, John, we don’t have time-”

“No,” John said loudly over him, picking up the umbrella sitting next to Mycroft’s chair and carrying it to the door, where he waited expectantly. “Now.”

Mycroft looked from John to Sherlock, as if seeking some kind of help from his younger brother, but Sherlock was still gazing at John with a worryingly intrigued look on his face. Intrigued and in shock, which was a strange combination, but worked for him, John thought. John tipped his head toward him, raising his eyebrows, and Sherlock looked confused briefly before seeming to snap out of whatever daze he was in.

“Yes, right,” he said briskly, jumping up out of his chair to loom over Mycroft. “Off you go. We have-” and here he faltered slightly, looking back to John like he was some kind of rare form of the plague that he was dying to get under his microscope, “things to get done.”

Mycroft, who clearly knew his brother and must have expected this, rolled his eyes as he stood up and insisted, “There are more important things to attend to right now than your curiosity.”

“Oh, like what, Mycroft? _Please_ ,” Sherlock sneered and began moving toward his room. John heard him call from the kitchen, “He speaks to the _dead_ \- it’s not as if he can help them after that, can he?” There was a slight pause, and Sherlock came quickly back into the room, giving John that look again. “Can he?”

“John,” Mycroft said seriously, completely ignoring his brother. “I realize this may not have been the most graceful way to go about this, but we really need the both of you to-”

“No!” John reiterated when Mycroft opened his mouth to answer, and yanked open the door. He was suddenly aware that while Mycroft had just essentially outted him, there were quite a few things Sherlock didn’t know about yet. Namely, the whole soulmate thing, and he’d take Mycroft down to the floor to keep that from coming out at this point. “Out now, please.”

Mycroft stood for a moment looking as if he were weighing the consequences of pushing the matter. John stood resolutely by the door, only moving to lift the umbrella to him in feigned politeness before gesturing deliberately down the stairs. Mycroft gave a gusty sigh through his nose, and then moved casually toward the door with more dignity than he really deserved at that point, John thought. He wisely kept his distance as he took the offered umbrella, but didn’t move immediately toward the door. “I’ll contact you soon. This really is an urgent matter, and time is of the essence. For the both of you,” he stressed, looking toward Sherlock meaningfully.

John was too pissed off to answer coherently. He settled for glaring murderously until Mycroft got the point and moved toward the stairs, and then slammed the door behind the interfering bastard with the vague hope that he’d caught him in his posh arse.

There was silence on the other side of the door for a moment, and then the gentle tapping of Mycroft descending the stairs and the front door closing. John stood stiffly, staring at the door even after the sounds of his departure had faded, because Sherlock was standing behind him and he was so pissed off, he didn’t think he was capable of having a rational conversation at the moment. Well, as rational as the conversation they were going to have could possibly be.  

John wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at the door without actually seeing it before Sherlock came up beside him to stare at it with him. The ensuing silence was one of the most awkward John had experienced in his entire life, and it only got worse when Sherlock turned his head to stare down at him and continued to stay silent. John stared resolutely at the wood grain and refused to turn around.

Sherlock eventually cleared his throat. “So,” he started in a falsely casual tone. “You and my brother seem to be rather chummy.”                                                                                                                    

“What?” John asked suddenly, breaking his staring contest with the door to give Sherlock a look of disbelief. “That’s it? That’s your reaction to- _that_?”

“You did say,” Sherlock said down his nose in an affronted tone, “that you’d only met him once or twice. Which gave the impression that you were not, in fact, on a first name basis with him, when _clearly_ you’ve been working on this together.”

The unspoken _without me_ was so audible in Sherlock’s tone that John couldn’t help but laugh incredulously. “You’re jealous.”

Sherlock opened his mouth, the _am not_ perched so precariously that John practically heard it before Sherlock snapped his mouth shut and stood glaring. He started again with, “You _said_ -”

“I said I’d met him twice, and I had,” John said firmly. “The first time in my bedroom when I moved in and the second earlier tonight when you went running off with a serial killer. I had to find you somehow,” he added when Sherlock rolled his eyes. “It’s not as if you left me with many choices.”

“That’s because I didn’t need you to find me. I would have been _fine_ ,” Sherlock insisted, then frowned when John sighed in irritation.

“God, this again. Fine, yes, you’re invincible against everything, even bloody- _possessed cabbies_ ,” he snapped, and then turned to walk toward the kitchen. More tea. There was very little John had found that couldn’t be fixed with more tea.

John heard rather than saw Sherlock come into the kitchen behind him. And by heard, he meant that when Sherlock spoke next, it was from right behind him and startled him so badly that he dropped his tea bag. How the hell could someone _alive_ be as quiet as a dead person?

“John,” Sherlock said eventually.

“Yes?” John asked as he poured boiling water over a new tea bag (because God only _knew_ what was on _that_ kitchen floor).

“Did you say _possessed_ cabbie?”

John shrugged. “According to your brother.”

Sherlock made a reflexively disgruntled noise at the mention of his sibling. “As if Mycroft knows anything about-” he stopped suddenly and went silent for so long that John actually turned around to see if he was still in the room. He was staring at the cabinets above John’s head in concentration, a small furrow between his eyes the only sign that anything was out of the ordinary.

“What?” John finally asked, and Sherlock’s gaze moved down to him.

“You thought Mycroft was dead,” he said in a suspicious tone.

“I did,” John agreed. He was still pissed off enough that he had very little reservations about letting Sherlock know about anything Mycroft may possibly have preferred remain secret. “Because when I met him, he was glowing.”

Sherlock stared as if waiting for the punchline, but John just raised his eyebrows.

“What do you mean,” Sherlock finally inquired as if it physically pained him to have to ask, “that he was _glowing_?”

John shrugged, then picked up his tea and turned to go to the sitting room. “It’s what dead people do. They’re sort of… phosphorescent.” He went to move forward, but Sherlock didn’t budge an inch, so he ended up stopping short and sloshing tea over the side of his cup, before swearing and moving around him to get out of the kitchen. When he got to his chair and finally sat down with the boxes of cold Chinese, Sherlock was still standing in the kitchen, though he’d turned to stare after John.

“What, like plankton?” he scoffed.

“Yeah, or a glow worm, whichever you like,” John muttered in return and picked up a carton to pick at his rice.

Sherlock moved into the sitting room finally, and went to look out the window. “This is ludicrous. Glowing ghosts, possessed cabbies.” He ruffled a hand through his curls in an agitated gesture, scowling out the window.

John was too tired to do anything but shrug. Because it was ludicrous, but that didn’t make it any less true and it definitely didn’t make him any less done with this conversation.

But then Sherlock went and said, “It’s all Mycroft’s fault and his bloody government pseudo-scientific _testing_.”

John looked up from pushing the carrot cubes around his rice in surprise. “Sorry. The pseudo what?”

“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” Sherlock sneered.

John looked up at him in bemusement. What was his problem? They’d known each other for less than two days- it wasn’t as if Sherlock had some claim on him. Although, he realized with some amount of shame, that if their positions had been reversed, he’d be just as bad, if not worse. He had the excuse of some ridiculous _soul bond_ , though, and he was fully blaming it on that.

Unless…

John blinked in alarm at the sudden realization that maybe this whole soulmate thing wasn’t just on his side of things. What if Sherlock was feeling the same strange, unsettling pull that he was toward the other man?

As Sherlock stared moodily out the window, pouting like a toddler who’d been told to share his favorite toy, John decided that he was not asking. Not yet anyway. It was too hard to parse out his own feelings, let alone deal with someone else’s.

“Sorry, hang on,” he said backtracking to his original question. “Your brother is part of a government experiment?”

“He is the government experiment,” Sherlock said flatly.

John waited for an explanation, and then asked when there was none, “And they’re experimenting with…?”

“Telekinetics. Mind control. Astral projection,” he said with obvious disdain. “Ridiculous. It’s Hitler all over.”

“Without the genocide, you mean,” John said dryly, and Sherlock shrugged as if he wasn’t sure but didn’t care either way. John stared at him. “Are you seriously comparing your brother to Hitler?”

“It’s not difficult,” he said, then turned his head to glare at John. “Why are we still talking about him?”

“You brought him up,” John said mildly as he sipped at his tea. “But since we’re on the subject-”

Sherlock cut him off with an irritated noise and moved with far less stealth than he was capable of toward the couch, where he collapsed and stared at the ceiling.

 _Well_ , John thought as he stared at him, _that was the end of that conversation, wasn’t it?_

He shrugged and picked up the carton of cooling rice and another random one to take into the kitchen and reheat. If Sherlock didn’t want to talk about this right now, he was perfectly fine with that.

He replaced the disturbing jar of human eyeballs when his rice was warm again and took it back into the sitting room. Sherlock had sat up at some point and was watching him with intense, calculating eyes that John did his best to ignore as he settled back into his chair and- finally- started eating.

Sherlock continued to stare at him, and it wasn’t until halfway through his meal that he said anything. “You’ve not been doing this long.”

John put the rice down and picked up his tea. “Doing what?”

“This- the- _thing_.” Sherlock said and then snapped his jaw shut, looking at John determinedly as he took a deep breath, as if he had to force himself to say, “Talking to the dead.”

John raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“John, I rather thought you might be a bit of a lunatic when I met you,” Sherlock said with a smirk. “Yours are not the actions of the man who is used to concealing anything.”

" _I'm_ the lunatic?" John said. "I'm not the one keeping toes in the crisper."

Sherlock’s eyebrows drew together. “Well where would you keep them?”

John stared over the rim of his mug. “Yes, clearly _I’m_ the unstable one.”

“You were talking to no one,” Sherlock insisted defensively.

To which John had only one reply, which was to point to the skull on the mantle and raise an eyebrow.

Sherlock glanced at it, then rolled his eyes dramatically. “Well it doesn’t speak _back_.” His lip quirked up as he looked back at John. “Mostly.”

John snorted into his tea. “Well at least when I talk to dead people, they listen.” He smirked. “Mostly.”

Sherlock huffed a laugh and then stared at the fireplace. His face was still and impassive, but his eyes were bright and sharp as he looked into the empty grate. John watched him and chewed, wondering what he was thinking, until Sherlock suddenly jumped out of his chair and stalked toward the door.

John automatically straightened and moved toward the edge of his chair, ready to follow without making a conscious decision to. He stopped himself with his hands pushing down on the chair’s arms to push himself up, trying to reign in the flash of panic at the thought of being left behind. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” he replied sharply, tugging on his coat, then stopped and turned when John pushed himself up and took a step forward. “What are you doing?”

“Er,” John said, still halted between steps and a little off balance, since he wasn’t actually sure. “Well, I was-” He reached blindly down toward the coffee table, and grabbed a mug when his hand bumped it. “The tea. Cold, I was gonna-” He cleared his throat, and looked down to stare somewhere in the vicinity of Sherlock’s knees, before glancing back up at his face. He looked vaguely amused, one side of his lip quirked up, and John, ridiculously, felt suddenly like a baby duck, scrambling to follow. What was he _doing_?

“Good,” Sherlock said with a faint note of irritating indulgence. “Stay and get settled in. Just don’t-” he waved a hand at the mess that was the sitting room, “touch anything.”

John turned automatically to look around the room, and by the time he had looked back toward the door, Sherlock was calling up to answer his unspoken question from halfway down the stairs, “I have a system!”

John rolled his eyes and huffed a laugh, looking around the room again, taking in the chaos, and generally ignoring the growing tightness in his chest. It felt uncomfortably like the beginnings of panic, which would be ridiculous, because Sherlock was a grown man that John had known less than a day, and had no need of a babysitter.

Except, of course, when a mad serial-killing cabbie was offering him poison.

John’s hand flexed around the forgotten tea mug he was holding, and he decided that another cup or five really couldn’t hurt.

If anyone had accused John of waiting up for Sherlock on the couch he’d carefully cleared, he would have thrown his fifth cup of tea on them in indignation, and then promptly turned over to close his eyes and listen for his flatmate’s footsteps. His leg was throbbing faintly, but not with sharp phantom stabs like he was used to. He stretched it lazily, fighting a losing battle against a ridiculous grin as the naturally exhausted muscle burned lightly. He’d spent three hours flipping through the telly and rummaging through some of the more interesting items around the flat and basically trying not to be too obvious about fretting over Sherlock’s whereabouts.    
Eventually, he’d ended up laid out on the leather couch, the light from the muted television flickering over his face as he drifted on the edge of sleep, jerking awake whenever he crossed into it. It was the type of night he’d normally wake as he screamed into his pillow, and as the periods between waking got further apart, it occurred to him that he should probably move to bed upstairs if he wanted to retain a modicum of dignity. The only problem with that was that he wouldn’t hear Sherlock when he got back in, and to John’s sleep-fogged mind, it was vitally important that he know the second the idiot walked in the door.

The slide from half-conscious to fully asleep was insidious and nearly indiscernible. One moment John was feeling the slight stick of the couch’s leather on his skin as he shifted, and the next he was opening his eyes to stare at the blank grey wall of his old bedsit. He blinked quickly in confusion, before every muscle in his body suddenly tensed in rising panic. Because _of course_ the last twenty four hours had been the fantasy of a mind on the brink of tearing itself to pieces from stagnation.  Things like cabbie serial killers, like jumping London rooftops, like sodding _Sherlock Holmes_ were too ridiculous and fantastic to be true, and really, John should have known better. He slammed his eyes shut, desperate for sleep to return with the dream and no thoughts beyond that, when a purring voice, thick with amused condescension pulled him back into the drab grey room.

“Wounded war veteran,” it said and John felt a brief flash of confusion when he couldn’t immediately pinpoint the source. His hand wrapped around the grip of the pistol under his pillow, but he otherwise remained still. “They told you that you were a hero, didn’t they?” it continued in a hissing growl, closer with each slow word. John tightened his grip on the gun, gritting his teeth against the overtly false tone of sympathy, close enough now that John could feel cold breath on his neck. “It’s a bit of a euphemism, isn’t it?”

John shot up, swinging upright to aim blindly into the empty, dark room. He looked around in wary confusion as he stood up and began moving, scanning the still shadows for any shift, ears tuned for a faint scrape or tap. The only sounds he could discern, though, were his feet making soft noises as they made contact with the wood floor and his own breathing. He stopped moving with his back against the wall by the kitchenette, hand poised over the light switch. “Euphemism for what?” he asked, more to distract than because he really wanted to know. He hit the switch, braced for a flood of light that never came. He hit it twice more, each more violent than the last before swearing.

“Damaged,” was the sibilant, grating reply, suddenly in front of him and all amusement gone. John watched as a gleaming, vibrant glow flowed forward into the room from nowhere, viscous like blood and sharp-bright, but without the purity of light. John’s entire being seemed to shrink from it even as he leveled his pistol at it, watching as it stopped four feet from him, suddenly spiraling upward in a tight column. He’d never contemplated the existence of anything purely evil before, anything without a soul, but John thought as he watched the sanguine wave settle into a human-like form, the vague impression of a face taking shape, that if there was such a thing, it was standing right in front of him.

The thing smelled like blood, fresh and raw and metallic, so thick John could almost taste it. This was made even more disturbing by the fact that by the time the thing had settled, it had a human shape, a good six inches taller than John and wearing combat fatigues. For some reason that bothered John more than the fact that the thing had no eyes. Underneath blond brows, there were only sunken shadows of skin where eyes would be on a normal, human body, but as it turned its head as if looking around the small room, it gave the impression of somehow having sight.

And who the fuck knew, it probably did. John was honestly sick to death of trying to figure out how any of this worked.

“Doctor Watson, I presume?” it asked with a grin when it had finished- well, not looking, but _sensing_ out the bedsit. It stuck out its hand like it wanted to shake when John didn’t immediately respond. John’s body, tense as it was, read it as a threat before his mind processed the action, and he cocked the pistol, aiming straight between the shadowy hollows beneath its brows.

It dropped its hand, making a low hum of disapproval as it looked John over. “A bit redundant to threaten a dead man with a gun, isn’t it?”

John huffed an unamused laugh. “You’re not a dead man, though, are you?” He tilted the pistol at the wall behind the thing standing in front of him. “There’s no door to this room.”

It smiled suddenly, tilting its head in interest- which was pretty much creepy as hell. “Which would mean what, do you think?”

“Either you built a rather spot-on replica of my old flat around me, or I’m still sleeping.”

The thing grinned wider, and clapped, mocking and slow. “Very good, Doctor Watson. And here I was beginning to think it was all just hype.”

John growled under his breath and dropped the gun on the counter next to him. “Any time anyone wants to start making some bloody sense today, that would be great. Do you know how much faster these conversations would go without all the baiting?”

"Best get on with it then, shall we? Colonel Sebastian Moran," it said by way of introduction, but didn't reach for John's hand again.

John looked over the thing warily. "Is that your name or who you're wearing?"

“Does it matter?” it asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Yes, of course it does,” he answered. What was this? Did his gift only attract dead psychopaths now or something?

“Hmm,” was all it said, as it continued looking him over.

John just waited. Because there had to be a point to this meeting, didn’t there? You didn’t brain-jack someone without an agenda.

Looking at John must have gotten boring or something, because it turned suddenly and walked around the room, looking over the dregs of John’s pathetic former life. It was probably premature to think of it as _former_ , but John was nothing if not optimistic.

John sighed, dropping his head in weariness. It was too much to hope for that they’d just get to the point, wasn’t it?

“You know,” it said, and John’s eye twitched when it stopped to pick up his RAMC mug and inspect it closely. “You pull up the nightmares of someone who’s survived war, and… this isn’t what you expect, is it?”

John looked around the bedsit, feeling the grey, cold blankness of his life from just forty-eight hours ago brush his skin. He suppressed a shudder, straightening his spine.

It smiled suddenly. “But then I don’t think most understand people like us- dogs of war.”

“No,” John said sharply. “There’s no us. I’m nothing like you.”

It tilted its head again, snake-like. “You don’t know anything about me.”

John leveled him with a stony stare. “I know you put me here.”

“I did, didn’t I?” it mused. It looked around, its lip curling up slightly. “I think we all want out of here. I’ll get to the point, shall I?”

“Oh, thank God,” John muttered.

“I’m here with a message.”

“Does _no one_ in this city know I own a phone?” John snapped. “What is it now? You’re out for my soul? Hmm? Because you can just get in the fucking queue apparently.”

The dark humor clinging to the thing in front of him melted away suddenly, and blond brows dropped dangerously over eyeless hollows. “You think this is all about you, Watson? That you’re the only one out there who can do what we do? You’re not. You’re not even in the same _league_ as we are. But you know what? We’re going to give you a chance to be.”

John stared. “What?”

It stood straight suddenly, more menacing for the seriousness in its voice. “You come work for us, and in return you stay safe. The boss has been watching you, you know. Since the desert. Since you manifested. And he likes what he sees. You come to us with your beacon, and in return you get…” It seemed to look for the word it wanted. “Immunity, you could say. You and your, uh...”

It looked down at itself, like it was considering something, and then glanced back up at John. It smirked suddenly and then began to ripple back to red, filling the room with the scent of blood again, before it settled into a new, sickeningly familiar shape. It was nearly perfect, from the halo of dark curls, to the patent leather shoes. The only thing missing was the pale, slanted eyes.

John inhaled sharply, and grabbed his gun, taking half a step forward. “What is this? Who are you, really?”

It hummed contemplatively, a deep rumbling timbre that made John’s stomach turn. “I work for the spider. You could say I’m his… web.” It pulled on the fitted dark jacket, looking down to turn and inspect itself, smirking salaciously. “Oh, I can see why you like him.”

“Stop it,” John barked without meaning to, then bit his lips against the nausea roiling in his stomach.

It looked back up, smiling like it knew exactly what affect seeing it in Sherlock’s body was doing to John. “You think this is bad? Just imagine what I could do with the _real thing_.” It winked, and spun toward the wall, like it was going to leave through a door that wasn’t there, before turning to say over it’s shoulder. “Think about it, won’t you?”

John wanted to say something decisively in the negative, like _fuck you_ , but he was suddenly shaking so hard that his teeth were rattling, and there was shouting in his ear, desperate and angry and familiar.

John gasped and opened his eyes, scrabbling at the restraining weight on top of him.

“John!” Sherlock shouted, and John jolted, jerking away from the pale hands pulling him forward. Sherlock relented, letting go of John’s arms and holding his hands up where John could see them. His face was tight with worry, John wanted to weep with relief when the pale, searching, eyes scanned his face. “It’s fine, you’re fine. You’re in Baker Street.”

“Sherlock?” he gasped, inexplicably breathless and God, _sore_. He scrambled upright to grab Sherlock’s face, tilting his head so he could look into his eyes- not fleshy hollows of shadow, but actual, pale, still weirdly-colored eyes. He pulled Sherlock up onto the couch by his face while he made protesting noises, then leaned forward until he could rest his forehead against Sherlock’s, breathing in the faint smell of chemicals and expensive cologne, and nothing like blood. “Just, shut up a minute,” he panted when Sherlock tried to protest again.

Sherlock, surprisingly, fell silent. John felt himself relax by degrees, sinking back into the sofa without relinquishing his grip on Sherlock, until they were sitting side-by-side, and John had come back to himself.

With awareness, though, came a heavy rush of embarrassment.

John’s eyes popped open as he suddenly realized what he was doing- which was almost sitting in his flatmate’s lap.

“Christ!” John barked, jumping back. “Sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock said quickly, like he was trying to stave off any more uncomfortable emotional outbursts. He stared at John, eyes narrowed and John rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously. What the hell had he been thinking?

“Uh,” he said with a weak, humourless laugh, “maybe next time I kip on the sofa, you just let me lie there, yeah? A bit stupid to surprise a sleeping soldier.”

“John,” Sherlock said in his you’re-an-idiot voice. “You weren’t asleep, you were passed out cold.”

“What?” John asked in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“You barely had a pulse.” John stared at him, becoming even more confused as Sherlock’s voice took on a faint note of panic. “You were hardly breathing. I thought-” Sherlock said, then shut his mouth firmly.

John sat staring at him with no idea what to say. They sat in awkward silence for a moment, avoiding looking at each other before Sherlock jumped up suddenly, shouting, “Books!” and then ran into the kitchen.

John stared after him, not sure what that meant. Was he supposed to follow?

He sighed, standing up from the sofa with a pained groan, then jumped when something slid from his lap and banged against the floor. He bent to retrieve his fallen mobile, frowning at the message screen that lit up when he opened it. Four words from a blocked number.

_We await your answer._

The answer, John thought as he slammed his phone shut, was _hell no_. It would always be _hell no_ , and no amount of threatening was going to change that. He just had to keep his mad giraffe of a flatmate from running off on his own or poking sleeping tigers, or whatever, and everything would be fine.

He cringed against the futility of even trying as he heard a bang from the kitchen, and a cry of, “John, come quickly!” He sighed as he moved into the kitchen, where a pot of black feathers and strange herbs sat boiling black smoke on the stove.

At least they knew how to get a hold of him on his phone now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi? I'm sorry, it's been a long time, how are you?
> 
> FYI, if you wanna throw stuff at me in person, I'd love to get hit in the face by something weighing less than or equal to five pounds at Sherlock Con in Seattle on Friday and/or Saturday. My alpha-beta has generously offered to weigh said objects or provide one in case you can't find one yourself. She'll be accepting donations.
> 
> Was that too subtle? I'll be there. If you're there, we should say hi. (My alpha-beta will be there, too!) 
> 
> Less than seven months before the next one, I promise!


End file.
